The first pictorial featured girls from the Crazy Horse cabaret in Paris, who were regularly featured in men's magazines in the sixties and seventies. Here Baba Moleskine (not her real name we suspect) sprawls for Richard Fegley with her thighs apart but reveals little other than a penchant for deathsticks.
Flashing a little bit more was Playmate of the Month Pamela Jean Bryant, although in many of her shots it looked like some re-touching had de-emphasised her labia. Pamela was an eighteen year old student at Indiana University when she read in the college newspaper that Playboy photographer David Chan was in town shooting for the Girls of the Big Ten feature; the first of Playboy's college girl round-ups. Pamela had just failed to get into a college fashion show so didn't bother to go along for a tryout until, having seen many girls from her dorm go along, she went along at the last minute. As soon as Chan saw her he declared her to be Playmate material
The luminously aristocratic face of Jane Hargrave (July 1975) gazes out from the cover of Penthouse's April cover. She was the granddaughter of Sir Richard Wilmot Onslow, 7th Baronet and her mother's family could trace their lineage back to the Normans. We'll see more of her in 1978.
Playboy loved an orgy, of course, and the main non-centrefold pictorial that issue was a rather breathless account of the New York sex club Plato's Retreat where ordinary couples would spend $25 a time to interact with each other. Frankly, most of the people depicted looked far from ordinary and you got the impression that
Playboy had imported a lot of unusually attractive people for their pictorial. Still, there were some nice, if small, shots of people appearing to have lots of fun, with some of the shots being deliberately blurred to suggest frantic action.
Oui's May cover featured Australian model Linda Kerridge who made something of a name for herself as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, appearing in
Playboy as well in the December 1980 issue. Her
Oui pictorial was rather dull so we will wait until our 1980 review to appreciate her properly.
Jeff Dunas' photographs of "Velvet" were
Penthouse style in everything but their lack of labia. In fact the Playboy-style photo manipulation was in evidence in this study
There was not much of a contrast in styles further on in the magazine as it's Dunas again, this time with Jolene who was also flaunting a black hole where her pussy should be.
In fact, the only snatch of pussy comes from Frank Gitty's one shot of Jennifer. Just this little glimpse, however, is far more enticing than the spread legs but doctored nether regions of the other girls.
Oui really didn't know where it was going, visually, at this point. Perhaps the move to sunny California had addled its collective brain
May's
Club featured a girl they called Mireille photographed by Art Mancini in a pictorial which Triple P remembered seeing at the time when it appeared in
Men Only. Again, this open labia shot and the bondage picture (one of several in the pictorial which also featured, in many shots, the shadow of a man with a gun) weren't in the original
Men Only pictorial from the previous month. Mireille is, without doubt, Agent Triple P's favourite
Men Only girl from the seventies.
Rub a dub dub!
Also that issue was a rather strange pictorial done with special effects called
Pleasure Island by Jay Myrdal about a shipwrecked mariner who finds an old lamp. He gives it a rub (the lamp, that is) and out pops a sexy genie. Not really a couples pictorial this but the genie girl was rather cute. American Myrdal formed a partnership with British photographer Peter Smith under the name JP Smut for many of their girly magazine shoots. Myrdal, who attended the University of Montana now has a studio in Oxfordshire specialising in advertising and other commercial work.
More high fashion
style on
Penthouse's cover featured a young lady, Danielle Guerra, who wasn't in the magazine, sadly. Photographed by Peter Strongwater in a revolutionary style which was quite appropriate for an issue where the non-sex content was focussed on political injustices in America. Strongwater was a top celebrity photographer (he even shot Hugh Hefner in 1982) who worked on some major advertising accounts as well. He never contributed a pictorial to
Penthouse, though.
The first girl in that month's issue, Brie, was photographed by Jim Foxx in his second of three pictorials for
Penthouse during 1977 and 1978. Here Foxx gives us an enticing shot of an oily Brie. Very nice with a baguette and a glass or two of Provence rose. There were, unusually, signs of blurring of Brie's genitals in her pictorial which made you wonder whether the magazine was going to backtrack on the level of explicitness it had demonstrated in 1977, just as
Playboy and
Oui were doing.
Whilst the likes of
Hustler were getting their models to open their engorged labia with their fingers for the camera,
Penthouse's approach was still more to do with faux masturbation. Something that
Hustler hadn't really done yet. May's Pet of the Month, Angela Hyer, was shown appearing to diddle herself in a host of pictures in her centrefold feature by FW Eck. In fact her potent centrefold shows Angela, unusually for
Penthouse, gazing sensuously at the camera whilst her finger probes at her pussy. It's an invitation and a challenge at the same time.
This one (below) demonstrates the new Pubic Wars frontier in getting the model to slide a finger between her labia; a pose that had only been done a few times to date in
Penthouse. These interior shots of Angela were all done in the Casino del Caribe and Hotel Las Velas, Cartagena, Colombia, somewhere Agent Triple P has to visit shortly.
Angela takes the title of 1978's self-caressing queen and it's a shame Eck didn't do more pictorials like this for
Penthouse; although there is one more to come in 1979.
Angela is a beautiful, leggy, elegant-looking creature who was 28 years old at the time her pictorial was published. In reality, she is the well known British actress Victoria Tennant, the daughter of a famous theatrical agent and a Russian ballerina. Her Godfather was Laurence Olivier! She studied ballet for eight years and then acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Unlike some of the other models featured on these pages, she forged a proper acting career which included Emmy and Golden Globe nominations although she appeared in quite a few naked sex scenes in her films.
Victoria in All of Me (1984)
Triple P particularly remembers her from the 1983 mini-series
The Winds of War. She was also married to American comedy actor Steve Martin from 1986 until 1994. She is still acting today and her latest film is currently in post production.
The third pictorial in that issue, of Debi Evans by Stan Malinowski, had another gently probing finger but this time across a full double spread.
That month
Penthouse had four pictorials and the last one was of Julienne Schuster by Carl Wachter who demonstrated that she was very aware of her delightfully fleshy pussy. One thing that had temporarily disappeared from
Penthouse at this time was anuses (unlike
Club for example) and these shots were as close as this issue got.
Chic carried on using the large format of the UK magazines such as
Club International and
Men Only. It also continued to only feature full page or double page spreads of its models, such as the exotically ethnic Elena here
One other feature of their photographic approach was the use of close-ups of their models genitals. Something which
Penthouse, for example, had yet to do. It wasn't as if their models were unattractive either. The
Chic girls were easily as beautiful as the women from
Playboy, Penthouse and
Oui.
They did go for the
Hustler style labia spreading, however, as shown in this mirror shot of Francine.
These final two are from two different girls in the magazine, not that you can tell, as all the attention is on their pussies as well as their boldly displayed anuses.
The cover for
Hustler's May issue was even more gynaecological, literally as shown by their very alternative Mother's Day cover.
Inside they featured, as their first pictorial, a heavily pregnant girl. A lady reader wrote in:
"The perverted cover of your May issue is a disgrace! I really don't know who's responsible for this particular picture, but whoever it is, I say and believe that this person has a sick mind." Another reader wrote in, however, appreciating both the cover and the pregnant girl and wanted more. You can't please everyone.
No doubt they would have been much happier with the conventional shoot of blonde Sara by James Baes, who had her nether regions lit up as if by a targetting searchlight.
A relatively unusual period costume piece for that month's
Hustler's Honey with Arlene in garters, corset and ankle boots. The set design is all very
Penthouse.
Hustler positively revelled in letters from their readers saying that something was disgusting and offensive so they must have appreciated the rant from a Pennsylvanian reader about the next pictorial
Belle of the Ball which featured a white girl in
Gone With the Wind mode and five black "slaves".
"I can't stand those black, dirty animals to start with, and to see even one with a white bitch makes me want to puke. The idea of five niggers overpowering a white whore (any white bitch that goes for that slime) kind of ruined the whole issue. I'm sure that many people felt the same way. Do yourself, as well as the rest of your readers, a favor. Don't print that nauseating trash anymore." Hustler sensibly declined to comment but would come back with a suitable riposte in subsequent issues, especially January 1979.
The irony was that at that point Larry Flynt was lying in hospital having been shot, on March 6th, in Lawrenceville, Georgia while making a court appearance to defend Hustler from yet another court obscenity charge. The definition of what constituted obscene having been passed down to the local level of government, ensuring a plethora of lawsuits. The gunman escaped and there was huge speculation as to who had shot him. Flynt reckoned it was the CIA. Some think it was the Mafia as Flynt supposedly owed them a large amount of money.
Years later, an already convicted serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to the crime on the basis that
Hustler had published an interracial girl/boy pictorial. All of Franklin's other victims were part of interracial couples and Flynt himself believes Franklin's testimony, although it has never been to court.
We don't think that the man from Pennsylvania would have been too pleased with the final girl, the mixed race Keli, further on in the magazine either. This does look closer to an attempt at a
Penthouse-style pussy playing shot than most in the magazine although she is still brazenly looking at the lens rather than lost in her own
Penthouse-style reverie..
Playboy's Playmate of the Year cover featured the unmistakable golden mane of Debra Jo Fondren photographed by Robert Scott Hooper who had originally discovered her in Las Vegas and shot her September 1977 centrefold feature.
Playmate of the Month was Gail Stanton photographed by David Chan, who produced this tactile shot of a nicely shiny Gail in the sauna. Born Brenda Stone, in Memphis Tennessee, she changed her name for Playboy as her father was a deacon at a Southern Baptist Church. She first appeared in the magazine in the Girls of the New South pictorial in the April 1977 issue where she was described as a computer programmer.
Her Girls of the New South picture from the Playboy Japan edition
The diminutive Miss Stanton (she was 5'1") had gone out with Elvis Presley as a young model. After Playboy she carried on modelling and was Miss Michelob Lite in the early eighties. Tragically, she too came to an early end, dying at the age of just 42 of a blocked colon.
Debra Jo in excelsis
This is one of
Playboy's most iconic photographs; taken by Francis Giacobetti in Paris. Fondren is a golden Goddess with that fantastic hair cascading over her body like a shimmering waterfall at sunset. This, however, had been
Playboy's most visually conservative issue for some time but, as Fondren and Stanton demonstrate, the quality of their raw material was such that they didn't have to fight with
Penthouse any more on the explicitness stakes.
Given the disappearance of nipples on the covers of most of the top men's magazines
Oui's June cover of Susan Swanson by Gary Heery was quite racy with more nudity than the other big three were risking.
Talking of racy covers, the March 1978 cover of
Oui had featured a model spilling out of her dress called Sue. Lots of letters were received asking for more of her and so here she was as June's centrefold in a perineum revealing shot by Jeff Dunas.
In another feature Jeff Dunas chose a couple of models, took them around Los Angeles and had them flash whilst he flashed them with his camera. This young lady is in front of the Century Plaza hotel where Agent Triple P had an enjoyable few days with a Taiwanese American girl he met in the hotel's bar. She picked up Triple P, we should add.
Giving Dunas a bit of a break, the issue's third pictorial had Eric Mueller catching Helene in another invisible pussy pose. Still, at least in this one the shadow looks natural rather than sprayed on.
Given the new found modesty of its girls it was something of a surprise to find Francis Giacobetti's photo of Charlie presenting her package so clearly in the last of four girl pictorials for
Oui. Going forward we would see the return of the boy/girl pictorial, however, and the end of just exclusively single girl pictorials in the magazine.
Club's June issue was pretty typical for the time with no concerns visible about the explicitness of their well-lit labia shots and some
Hustler-style spreading in evidence..
A group pictorial,
Two for the Road, by Jay Myrdal had the usual small pictures placed on the dead areas of larger ones giving it the same bitty and annoying style seen in Paul Raymond's UK magazines as well.
A strange mixture of period hat and accessories and modern sparkly stockings in this fetching squatting shot.
Club's cover and centrefold girl Katie presented this typically assertive
Club rear end shot. Oddly, in the UK,
Men Only had her still displaying her anus but covering her pussy with her fingers.
Finally, we have a nice inside the knickers caressing shot from Farrah by Rupert Daines. She was called Maggie in
Men Only but this picture didn't appear in her pictorial in the UK.
A rather garish cover for June's Genesis also saw them headlining the Plato's Retreat club in new York which had already been covered by Playboy and Penthouse. Genesis hadn't had nipples on the cover since July 1977 and so joined all the other major magazines in this.
The first pictorial was of British Actress Lesley-Anne Down who had appeared in period drama
Upstairs Downstairs. These were an old set of pictures taken, when Down was a teenager, by Kirk Douglas' son. Although she had agreed to do them she got so stressed by the thought of the forthcoming shoot that she ate and ate before the session, piling on the weight as a result. This set had originally appeared in
Mayfair in 1975 and the pictures were old then.
In contrast with Down's modest topless shots
Genesis' next girl Lily was photographed by Bob Veze in typical
Hustler style.
Veze was responsible for the centrefold, of supposed Venezuelan beauty Carmen, as well.
Genesis had a unique centrefold feature in that it would sell its readers a 2'x3' poster of the centrefold image. This was presumably so people could have the image without all the text on it, telling you how you could buy it as a poster.
Genesis, like
Chic, had a lot of two page images like this, not just the centrefold.
An appropriate end to our look at June 1978's Genesis is this rear view of Penny by Roy Brewington who did a lot of work for Mayfair as well as directing erotic films.
June's
Penthouse had another Peter Strongwater fashion-style cover shot of model Catherine Roberts who, again, didn't appear inside the magazine.
After the lack of labia on display in the first pictorial of the May issue it was back to normal with Earl Miller's shots of Tracy Gordon who could be found playing with her pussy on a sofa.
Centrefold Corrine Alphen was 23 when she posed for
Penthouse. A real beauty she would return to be Pet of the Month once more in August 1981, eventually becoming Pet of the Year for 1982. Her pictorial was shot by Stan Malinowski and apart from one or two shots such as this (above) eschewed the usual spread leg and faux masturbation shots for a more 1974 style approach. Her subsequent pictorials in the eighties were rather more graphic.
Corinne in Spring Break
Corinne appeared in quite a number of B-movies in the eighties, including the famous
Amazon Women on the Moon (1987). Her role in 1983's
Spring Break was praised by none other than top American film critic Roger Ebert (who died just recently), who said:
"Spring Break co-stars a young woman named Corinne Alphen, who is described as Penthouse's 1982 Pet of the Year. Sad to say, most of the Pets and Playmates who win movie roles turn out to be sort of self-conscious and untalented as actresses. Not Corinne Alphen. She has a dazzling smile, a great personality and a relaxed naturalness on the screen that makes the Horny Teenage Boys seem all the more gauche. A funny little movie might have been made about her adventures in Fort Lauderdale. She would have had the personality to carry it."Finally, we had another pictorial by Dieter Schmidt featuring some of his characteristic upskirt shots. In this case he got his girl, Hilary Corona, to stroke herself under her skirt too. Hilary also definitively bought the anus back to
Penthouse as well. This would be Schmidt's last
Penthouse pictorial until 1986.
Hustler's striking June cover by James Baes was to highlight an announcement by Larry Flynt that they were changing the nature of the magazine from the July issue. The editorial said that:
"Our pictorials will concentrate on the whole body, physical and spiritual (Flynt was still in the middle of his one year born-again Christian state brought on by contact with Jimmy Carter's evangelist sister Ruth)
rather than just on the sex organs."The Bits and Pieces section at the beginning of Hustler was full of wierd stories and even weirder pictures about (largely) sex. Amidst the grotesque cartoons, pictures of animals having sex and other "humour" was this vintage picture. The joke from Hustler's point of view was that this wasn't vintage pornography but a co-ordination test for the young lady. Whatever, they managed to get a girl grasping an erection and pissing in one picture into the magazine. Were they testing the waters for what was to come later in the year?
A typically bizzare pictorial, also by James Baes, saw models superimposed on food items, echoing the statement on the cover.
Hustler announced that this June issue would be the last that featured
"our regular girl photos. the last of an inventory of Hustler Honeys." Was this a joke? What would July bring instead? Whatever, Baes manages to catch his burger girl with an open cunt
and an open arsehole. Something that wouldn't be seen for some time in
Penthouse.
The last Honey (if
Hustler was to be believed) was the rather gloomy looking Rececca who, nonetheless gave us this
Penthouse style pussy stroking shot.
Sue claimed to be from a small town in Oregon. She was rather chunkier than a model you would see in
Penthouse or
Oui, let alone
Playboy. Hence she spent most of her pictorial with her skirt around her waist or visibly holding in her stomach. In Larry Flynt's autobiography he wrote:
"We'd advertise (for models)
in the littlest, shittiest weeklies and get our girls from rural areas and poor suburbs. We paid them less than a third what Playboy or Penthouse paid - $1500 compared to $5000." Likewise, it's doubtful if Anne would have made the cut with the other magazines and, again, her midsection was covered up too in her brief pictorial.
Hustler wasn't interested in a trim waist, however, it was just all about that dark, juicy, pink pussy. Would the July issue really be different? Were they about to indulge in a
Playboy style retreat on the explicitness front. Had Flynt got tired of all the obscenity charges? We'll have to wait until next time!
