This month's centrefold takes us back an amazing 37 years to January 1977. We say it's amazing because we can still remember first looking at this pictorial shortly after it came out and being stunned by it and it doesn't seem that long ago!
We saw this pictorial in a copy of the UK edition of Penthouse which someone brought along to school. We hadn't actually seen a men's magazine since the previous summer and hadn't been aware of the increase in explicitness which had taken place in the previous six months.
Interestingly, at this time, we had just acquired (or, more properly, she acquired me) our first real girlfriend who had joined the local archery club which Triple P had also just joined as it meant that we could avoid games at school, as we were allowed to substitute it for organised activities. This was important as in the autumn and winter terms it was a choice between, football, rugby or cross country running. Now the only sport Triple P was any good at was 400m running so running miles in the cold wasn't quite our thing. After a quarter of a mile our legs seized up and we had to walk the rest of the way which took ages. Anyway, this girl, A, was really, really pretty. Up until this point we had largely been impressed by women's figures to the exclusion of faces but this girl switched us on to the erotic power of the face.
This young lady, Marilyn Connor, had, Triple P thought at the time, a really lovely face too and we have not since changed our mind, either. Obviously, photographer Stan Malinowski thought the same as well.
Malinowski took Marilyn to the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado during the summer for these pictures and, unlike any other man's magazine at the time (and even more so now), included some scenic shots of the surroundings with no trace of Marilyn in them at all.
No doubt it was a great opportunity for Malinowski to show off his photographic credentials and the pictures certainly add to the pictorial, getting over a tremendous sense of place. Some of them look like Japanese woodblock prints and they must have appealed to Bob Guccione's artist's sensibilities as he let so many of them appear in the final pictorial.
One of the things we like about Penthouse pictorials from this period is that there would often be quite a lot of shots of the girls fully dressed which, somehow, rooted them more in reality as people rather than pieces of meat, as Larry Flynt once described the women in men's magazines at the time.
So we have no less than eight non-nude shots of Marilyn in the pictorial, split between the outdoor and interior locations of the shoot.
In addition we have three close up portraits of her face or partial face confirming her outstanding beauty.
The pictorial's first shot of her naked has her perched on a rock like some form of dryad. There is one of her up in the woods where she looks equally classical and rather like one of those Weimar Republic photographs of a healthy German maiden striking a pose in the countryside as she exposes her perfect (35-23-36 in Marilyn's case) body to the health giving (as they then thought) rays of the sun.
It takes some time before we start to get some more Penthouse style shots but we begin with this group of interior shots, where Marilyn has to struggle against some typically garish seventies prints.
Penthouse loved its mirror shots and here we have an interesting variation on them, focussing on Marilyn's superb legs reflected in a mirrored corner. Penthouse said she was five foot eight and she looked it.
At a time when Penthouse was asking its models increasingly to play with their pussies we got just this one effective shot of Marilyn probing inside her knickers.
Her tan lines seem to barely contain the gorgeously fluff pussy that emerges from underneath her sheer knickers.
This impressively lit shot was one of those that impressed Triple P all those years ago, as the light illuminated that brazenly displayed pussy and shockingly glimpsed anus.
There were two shots in that Aspen staple, the hot tub. although as there weren't any in Britain at the time we probably couldn't have identified it as such. The breast squeezing one harks back to the early days of Penthouse when such poses were characteristic.
The final three shots in the pictorial really impressed Triple P as well. More used to the pale and doughy young women in the likes of Mayfair, which was then more popular at school because it used some well known Page 3 models, we had never seen a woman photographed who looked like she was dripping in sweat like this. Even now we look at this final photograph and can almost smell her.
Sadly, Marilyn never appeared again in Penthouse and we haven't been able to identify her in any other magazines of the period either. We have some outtakes from the magazine sessions and the first one is from the rock dryad setting.
The next two are interesting in that they show the full outfit she was wearing in the mirror shot of her legs from the magazine pictorial.
Here is another interior shot of her in the white stockings. These shag pile carpets were very popular in the seventies especially in inappropriately bright colours! Triple P had an orange one in his bedroom!
Here we can see her putting on her towelling bathrobe ready for a good roast in the sun. We hope she didn't burn herself in the sun, especially as she was at altitude. Triple P remembers that at this time we used sun cream that was a massive factor four.
Here is Marilyn looking delightfully sweaty again. We spent a very hot August in Rome once, when most sensible Italians had got out of the city, and can remember our Italian girlfriend, I, sunbathing naked like this by the pool in the garden of her house south east of the Circus Maximus. We certainly enjoyed her slick, sweaty sunbaked skin.
The final two are remarkable in that Malinowski chooses to ignore Marilyn's eyes thus bringing her luscious lips into full focus. The top one makes her tits absolutely tactile: you just want to squeeze them and suck them. The bottom shot is all about that deliciously pink damp cunt. A lovely, salty, lickable treat!
So we like Marilyn as, for Triple P at the time, it was a very different sort of man's magazine pictorial and all the better for it. The 1977 Pets of the Month had some all time classic pictorials amongst their number and this is certainly one of them.
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