Centrefold Venus of the Month 24: Deanna Baker, May 1972

Here we have a lovely creature, from May 1972 in the lithe shape of the quite splendid Deanna Baker, photographed for her centrefold, in one of the most subtle examples from the early seventies, by Dwight Hooker.  The cover of that issue featured barbi Benton, then Hugh Hefner's girlfriend.

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Inside poor Deanna was somewhat handicapped by the fact that Playboy was still only devoting three pages of (largely) black and white pictures (plus the centrefold) to their Playmates (compared with the nine that Penthouse Pets would get).  Later in the year we would get the first five page Playmate feature but not for Deanna.

Some of the black and white pictures featured a narrative about Deanna getting ready for her job as a Playboy bunny in the Denver club and what better way to start than a nice bath?  This was still early days for pubic hair in Playboy and not every Playmate flashed as Deanna did at this time.  Her centrefold shot even shows a tiny hint of hair: only the fifth, up until that point, to do so. 

Deanna gets changed in the Denver club and displays a world-class posterior.  This is actually Triple P's favourite shot from the whole pictorial!

Time to squeeze into her Bunny costume with a little help from colleague Carol Ann Hughes.

 Ready for action!

Deanna was a pool Bunny, working three days at the week, at the Denver club on the top floor of a tower block at 1776 Grant Street.  Nothing to do with swimming, she was paid to challenge guests to that strange version of billiards the Americans play. 

Opening in 1967 the Denver club lasted just 10 years, closing in the midst of Playboy's financial squeeze in 1977.

In the pictorial the reportage pictures were taken by Bruce McBroom who showed Deanna in typical trendy 1972 garb and also at her judo class. 

In her pictorial article she claimed her judo training (a brown belt) came in useful when she had to jump out of a predatory businessman's car but as she had learned how to fall correctly she was uninjured!

A colour photograph displays her splendid posterior again; this time in the changing room of the judo club where she is puuting on her gi.

Again, rather unusually for the time, Deanna gives us a fluff-displaying full page-height picture of her falling out of her judo top.  She has a splendidly toned looking tummy.  She used to do athletics and softball at school in Kirksville, Missouri (she was born in St Louis). 

Triple P can't think of another photograph in Playboy of a girl on a plastic dinosaur so here we are.  Given it was 1972 it would still have been called a brontosaurus.

Nice boots!

Twenty two at the time of her pictorial, she had moved to Denver three years before, in 1969, starting at the Playboy club the following year.

The biggest surprise of her shoot, other than the plastic brontosaurus, comes on the page just before her centrefold.  The Pubic Wars were just hotting up as Playboy and Penthouse battled to see who could put out the sexiest pictures.  Only the month before Penthouse had had its first Pet, rather chastely, putting her hand on her pubic mound but it had been nothing like as raunchy as this photograph of an ecstatic looking Deanna, her hand firmly gripping her mound.  The first faux masturbation shot in Playboy.

Deanna's first appearance in the magazine had been in the Bunnies of 1971 pictorial in the August 1971 issue (above), just flashing a bit of fluff and clearly demonstrating her 22 inch waist.

A lovely study in contours

 

We have some more pictures of the lovely Deanna taken, largely, from the same sessions.  These could have taken place a considerable time before her centrefold was published.

At this time the girls were paid $3,000 on being accepted as a future Playmate and then another $2,000 on publication (the equivalent of about $26,000 these days using the comparative price index - consistent amounts as today's girls get $25,000).

The photographer did rather better receiving $6,000 for his Playmate shoot.

These poses are very much from Playboy's transitional period when the Playmate was still only, largely, depicted topless rather than full frontal.  The tree trunk in front of the groin pose was an old favourite!

We next set see her posing around a fountain and some garden statuary.

Again, even though she is flashing her fur in some of these there is a ceratin amount of cover-up going on.

The final one of her on the lion carries a certain erotic charge, however, which such am auto-erotic pose can't fail to deliver.

We like this one below, a crop of the picture three places above) where her inner thigh tendons curve into her very bushy mound which is pressed into the surface in a most alluring display. 

The next two take us back to the not so distant days when foliage was often used to conceal the offending pubic area.

The not quite concealing screen does give a rather enticing effect but, again, demonstrates the nervousness anout complete unobscured full-frontal nudity in the magazine at this time.

These are a couple of really nice examples of the early seventies innocent girl wandering in a sylvan landscape type.  Whether they would admit it or not they do owe quite a lot to the Guccione style, however.

In this one we get a welcome second outing for the leather hot pants she was wearing in the dinosaur photograph.

Here are another couple of outside location shots, one of which was certainly taken at a different time given the snow.

The red post picture isn't very successful as it makes poor Deanna look like she has a wooden leg!

This next picture is rather puzzling.  A horse frames the picture but Miss Baker looks like she is lying on the floor; except she can't be so what is she sitting on?  Strange.

Someone at Playboy must have liked it, however, as they used the picture in their 1974 calendar.

Her Playmate review picture in the January 1972 issue saw her strewn across some furs and nicely displaying her perfect torso.

This picture has her on a rather dubious looking leopard print sheets and pilowcases ensemble.  All rather Jason King.

Not all Playmates are beautiful, we have to say.  Some have, we suspect, been chosen for their figures rather than their faces but this is not an accusation you could level at Deanna.

She is perfectly lovely from every angle and her body is pretty faultless too.  Definitely one of our favourite Playmates of the seventies.

Here are a couple of nice shots of her in front of a rainy window.  A very tricky exposure, so to speak.

Close

Closer

Closest

Next we have an intererior shot of her wearing those splendid leather hot pants again.

The interior-shot pictures continue in the same way as the outdoor ones by mixing slighly coy pubic shots with the sort of poses that Playboy was using in the fifties and sixties to obscure the girl's groin.

The one below uses the famous knee-in-the-way approach but it's still an effective shot nonetheless..

This picture below is interesting in that it demonstrates that Deanna actually had a lot of freckles, which doesn't come across in her published shots at all.  Obviously this was one of those cases where Hugh Hefner told the printers to dial back on them, sadly.

Back in 1972 Playboy did not include a Playmate Data sheet (the first didn't appear until July 1977) giving the girls' vital statistics and their likes and dislikes.

This didn't mean that they didn't complete them, however, and retrospectively we can discover that Deanna was 5'7" tall and a slenderly symmetrical: 35-22-35.

More interestingly, she reveals that her favourite TV show was Star Trek.  Yes Deanna was a Trekkie!  Agent Triple P would venture that given her slim waist and long slim legs she would have looked utterly gorgeous in the original female uniform from the show.  Phasers set to stun!

Less enticing is her perfect meal choice of boiled shrimp (prawns in the Queen's English), Margaritas and tomato juice.

Not only is it nutritionally unbalanced but we can't think that Margaritas (surely the most disgusting cocktail ever) complement prawns very well.  We would probably opt for an Australian Reisling. 

Fancy a proper drink, young lady?

Despite visiting Mexico fairly regularly, and despite our desire to appreciate the local food and drink wherever we go, we just cannot develop a taste for tequila; a rank, vegetal drink that tastes exactly as you would expect given its origin.

Deanna licks an ice cream to take away the taste of the Margarita

Even worse, in Triple P's point of view, is the abomination that is tomoto juice;  the most revolting drink on earth.  Triple P likes tomatoes of every sort: cherry, plum, beef, sundried, mi-cuit, raw, fried, and grilled. 

Not so good for your teeth but preferable to tomato juice

Even the thought of tomato juice, however,  makes Triple P faintly ill.  The slimy, thick, tongue-coating texture (we don't like smoothies either) and that concentrated, tangy taste.  Ugh!

We suspect it is more a girls' drink (like smoothies) and certainly wouldn't trust a man who liked it. As for a Bloody Mary; surely this is a drink for those who don't actually like alcohol and is rather akin to those terrible alcopops that British teenagers seem to live on. 

More teasing pubic shots from Deanna in the style of the time.  She is demonstrating the principal difference between Playboy and Penthouse in this period in that she is looking at the camera in most of these shots.

 Another nice study of her superbly sculpted body

Some Playmates appear again and again in the magazine but Deanna was not one of those regulars, although she did front up a pictorial about lingerie in the July 1972 issue (above).

Five years later, however, Deanna appeared in a pictorial in Playboy's great rival Penthouse in the August 1977 issue.

Appearing under the name Rebecca Davenport, the accompanying text claimed that she was from South Carolina which we know she wasn't, unless she had moved there since her Playboy days.

An unusual, for Penthouse, looking at the camera shot

The piece also said she was twenty-two years old, but if the pictorial by Jeff Dunas was shot in 1977 then she would actually have been twenty-seven at the time.

It also gave her vital statistics as 36-23-35 which would be an appropriate slight increase on her 35-22-35 shape from five years before.  She still has the same skinny legs, however!

Deanna was the very first Playboy Playmate to have a pictorial in Penthouse as well.  Only three Playmates of the month have also been Pet of the Month (Lexie Karlsen, Linn Thomas and Victoria Zdrok but not for decades after this) but three Playmates have also had full pictorials in Penthouse:  Deanna, Ursula Buchenfellner (Playboy PotM October 1979 appeared in Penthouse as Ursula Fellner in the November 1985 Penthouse) and Teri Weigel (April 1986 Playmate and appeared in the May 1992 Penthouse).  We must look at these ladies another time.

The pictorial is pretty standard Penthouse style for the period with natural-looking light and a touch of soft-focus, without overdoing it.

Of course, in five years what had changed was the amount of pussy the girls were expected to display; although showing their genitals was still not automatic for every girl, even in Penthouse.

Deanna, as we have seen, pioneered the faux masturbation shot in Playboy and, indeed her black and white picture was far stronger than anything that had appeared in Penthouse at that point in 1972.

Her Penthouse frigging shot looks quite naughty but her fingers aren't quite where they appear to be at first glance.  It is, nonetheless, a nice sensual photograph.

Speaking of sensual, Triple P always likes a bathtub shot, particularly when its one of those old fashioned hip-baths, and Deanna's contemplative picture of her looking down at the water just lapping at her clitoris is a very nice example and demonstrates everything that Guccione wanted to achieve with his voyeuristic style.

Deanna is not shy about displaying her nicely prominent labia in this pictorial so, in a way, these shots are rather like seeing what might have happened in Playboy had they matched Penthouse pussy for pussy in the mid to late seventies.

You actually have a genuine seventies Playmate of the Month posing with completely revealing abandon.

So, a surprisingly full-on climax for Deanna/Rebecca in her double exposure in both Playboy and Penthouse in the nineteen seventies.

Altogether splendid!

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