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Weblog Archive: March 12, 2006 to Mar 18, 2006 Thursday, March 16, 2006
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Now and then over the years, Hefner experimented with small- or smallish-breasted Playmates. In late 1960, he had a serious fit of restraint: Joni Mattis, Miss November of that year, is posed in such a way as to cover not just her chest but most of her bottom. According to “The Playmate Book,” this centerfold was the least popular that the magazine ever published. Mattis received exactly one letter, from a clergyman advising her to find another line of work. By contrast, DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967, who looks to be about thirteen, and who displays, together with a big yellow hair ribbon, a pair of knockers rivalling Mae West’s, got more fan letters than any Playmate before or after. Playboy learned a lesson from DeDe: breasts count. At the end of “The Playmate Book,” we are given the average measurements of the Playmates from the sixties to the present: a modest 35-23-35. I don’t believe this. Or, if it’s true, there’s more to photography than I understand. In response to the Playboy centerfolds, Esquire eliminated its own pinups, the celebrated George Petty and Alberto Vargas drawings. In the words of Clay Felker, an editor at Esquire at that time, “Playboy out-titted us.” [...] But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice — a Ding an sich, and proud of it. By the eighties, the Playmates’ breasts are not just huge. Many are independent of the law of gravity; they point straight outward. One pair seems to point upward. [...] But, not infrequently, the magazine—or Hefner, for he is said to have carefully controlled all the centerfold shots—gets bored with these time-honored arrangements and puts the women in poses that no one else ever dreamed of. Isn’t it hurting Miss December 1966’s bottom, you think, to have it propped on the edge of those piano keys? That stereo turntable that Miss January 2004 is splayed over: Is it a B. & O.? How much is the repairman going to charge? Strangest of all are the scenarios in which the women are presented to us. Miss December 1992 is our waitress at the diner. She wears a collar and cuffs, a sporty little hat, red pumps, and nothing else. The magazine, in other words, has ceased trying to imagine a situation in which a woman might conceivably be naked; it has just come up with any situation—the girl might be receiving the Nobel Prize—and then removed the clothes. How much irony is operating here? I don’t know. Maybe none. [...] The fee for a centerfold shoot was five hundred dollars in the fifties. Today, it is twenty-five thousand dollars. [...] As for the Playmates’ acting history, the statement on Miss October 1999’s page—“On screen, Jodi’s best known as Ramdar, the ‘Super Hot Giant Alien Chick’ from ‘Dude, Where’s My Car’ ”—more or less sums it up. But film jobs seem to have been gravy. Miss July 1973 reports having appeared, presumably as a hostess, on “every game show ever created by man.” Another says that she did “about a hundred rock videos.” The lucky ones got roles in soap operas or sitcoms. Miss January 1957 went on to be David Nelson’s wife on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and in life. [...] At the same time, the text is very forthcoming about how many divorces these women have had, and how a number of them are no longer eager to have a man in the house. Several Playmates have found God. Debra Jo Fondren, the gorgeous Miss September 1977, who now does temporary secretarial work, reports that she finally stopped participating in Playboy promotions. There was “too much emphasis on sex,” she explains. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl. Kenneth Clark, in his classic book “The Nude” (1956), repeatedly compares a period’s nudes to its architecture. The Playmates of the past few decades look to me like the “cereal box” buildings that went up on Sixth Avenue in the sixties, those cold, shiny structures, with no niches, no insets—no doors, it seemed. Likewise, the current Playmates seem to have no point of entry. And wasn’t entry the idea? I gotta say that I agree; I don't think it's because my own tastes have changed that I tended to find the photoshoots in Playboy during the mid-Seventies/early-Eighties on the sexy side, and subsequently a lot less so. The mid-period young women struck me as plausibly attractive; the later ones strike me as plastic mannequins with make-up troughed on with a ladle. Of course, maybe that is just me. [...] Hefner’s latter-day nudes have the same look: the skin like polished armor (and it is polished—a side photo of Miss June 1981 shows her getting her hip sprayed with Formula 409); the golden light; the velvet thickness of the paper. This is not so much sex, or a woman, as something more like a well-buffed Maserati. I'm afraid so. On the other hand, I've not seen so much of the recent ones; like endless other men who once looked at (and, yes, even read some of the articles and interviews!) the magazine, well, there's not exactly a shortage of pictures of attractive women on the internets, and in porn (if one has the patience to find them admidst all the endless dross). So how's Hef himself? [...] In Russell Miller’s thorough and unadmiring book “Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy” (1984), Robert Gutwillig, a vice-president of the corporation, says that the purpose of these gatherings, as far as Hefner was concerned, was just to let the editorial staff blow off steam, after which, he hoped, they’d go away and leave him alone for another few months. According to Art Paul, the magazine’s longtime art director, one of Hefner’s girlfriends would sometimes call in the middle of the meeting, and then the boss excused himself: “We’d sit there waiting for him while he got laid.” Frequently, however, what he wanted was just to get back to the Mansion’s game room. Hefner is addicted to games: pinball machines, electronic games, board games. He likes to do forty-hour Monopoly marathons, fuelled by Pepsi (of which, it has been said, he used to consume three dozen bottles a day) and Dexedrine. His sage wisdom, after all those endless women? [...] He recommends Viagra: “There’s always a time when you’re looking for wood.” Another tip: “It is a good idea not to fall asleep while you’re actually having intercourse.” Why didn't I figure that out before? Alas, if that's all that one learns by 79+, and sleeping with thousands of beautiful women, perhaps the lesson is that the sex has to either be worth it in itself, or it just isn't worth it. Posted by "Richie Tenenbaum." (RT is a pseudonym of a slightly-well-known blogger not trying to hide his other name from anyone other than Google, who is guest-supplementing at DR.)
"Many celebrities have appeared on the cover of Playboy, but not nude, including Claudia Schiffer, Paris Hilton, Goldie Hawn, Raquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Brooke Shields and Donald Trump." How many people out there were disappointed when the Donald Trump nude pictorial didn't pan out? Damn teases. Tuesday, March 14, 2006
CLOSER director Mike Nichols "burnt" raunchy scenes of Natalie Portman in the hit movie to stop them falling into the wrong hands. The sexy actress played a pole dancer in the provocative film, but her topless scenes didn't make it into cinemas. She told Vanity Fair magazine: "I will not allow myself to be on a porn site… I don't want to be used by someone else for turning me into something that I'm not. "But I was doing everything because I knew that Mike was going to get my permission about everything and show me everything and talk to me. "He was like: 'That stuff's going to be burned if we don't use it.'" Sad, indeed, since she looked great in Closer; as a consolation, fortunately she can still be seen in many pics at locations such as here. Posted by "Richie Tenenbaum." (RT is a pseudonym of a slightly-well-known blogger not trying to hide his other name from anyone other than Google, who is guest-supplementing at DR.) |
