cover was their most outrageous yet with Karen Christy's nipples desperately trying to escape from their zip-up top (in fact a graphic).
Inside was some controversial celbrity fluff. As a fifteen year old, Canadian actress Heather Menzies had appeared as one of the von Trapp children in the Sound of Music (1965). She posed for Playboy eight years later because “Naively, I thought it would help me move on from The Sound of Music." Except of course that Playboy harped on about the Sound of Music throughout the whole piece. Nevertheless it gave us this delightfully fluffy study by Mario Casilli.
Their centrefold was a Swedish lady named Maria Ekorre who was a busy actress and model in the early to mid-seventies. When Oui's first edition came out the previous year Penthouse accused them of using one of their former Pets of the Month as their centrefold. The following year, however, Penthouse would feature Maria as their centrefold for March 1974.
This was quite a deliberate move on Guccione's part. In June that year US Chief Justice Warren Burger had ruled that local communities could decide what constituted an obscene publication. The way lay open for individual towns to force Playboy and Penthouse off the shelves wherever they felt like it. Guccione offered to set up special mail arrangements to send readers their copies of Penthouse if their local community had banned the magazine. In the end, apart from a very few places, nothing happened. Guccione, however, had reacted in his usual way and promised to become even more explicit than before and "go pink" by showing the girls' labia. Lane was the first of these pioneering Pets. The pressure was back on Playboy.
photographed by Ken Marcus which took the magazine's approach to this subject to a new sensual and explicitly lesbian level as their two young ladies undressed, kissed and caressed each other.
The battle on the newsstands was getting more intense as more players entered the market. Playboy was now fighting on multiple fronts. It was becoming obvious too that rather than taking sales away from Penthouse as intended, Oui was actually taking them away from Playboy.
Soft Sue
Inside, the Playmate, Geri Glass, got a five page pictorial insted of three for only the second time. In their annual Bunnies pictorial we can see from this picture of Jet Bunny Sue Huggy that Guccione style soft-focus is starting to invade the pages of Playboy.
Johnny Crawford displays the first penis in Playboy
Elsewhere in
Playboy, after nearly twenty years of depicting naked women, they actually showed a full frontal male nude as part of a pictorial on the Playboy film production,
The Naked Ape, based on Desmond Morris' bestseller.
Penthouse Pet for September was Anneka de Lorenzo (real name Marjorie Lee Thoreson) in a very nice pictorial by Bob Guccione which featured her squeezing into an old- ashioned hip-bath.
Anneka was later to find notoriety when she travelled to Rome with Guccione to work on Caligula, including the infamous hard core scenes he filmed without director Tinto Brass' knowledge. Guccione also paid for her to have a breast enlargement but happily she is still in her natural state in this pictorial.
Penthouse announced its Pet of the Year runner up as Billie Deane (Gillian Duxberry) who gave us this bold spread legs shot. Playboy had certainly not posed any of their precious Playmates in such an unladylike way as yet.
Playboy went for another Penthouse style cover for its October cover with Sheila Ryan being photographed in full-on boudoir style by Richard Fegley.
Valerie Lane's centrefold for October 1973
Inside, Playmate of the Month Valerie lane had to settle, once more, for a paltry three page, plus her centrefold, pictorial.
Oui was much more like Penthouse as regards the length of its pictorial features usually featuring three seperate girls most of whom, early on, were provided by Lui in Paris.
Lui/Oui girls were much more likely to be photographed outside in bright sunlight than those in either Penthouse of Playboy. This delightful study of Hanna from the October issue also demonstrates that Oui girls could be shown with hair on their thighs, providing it was pale of course: something you certainly wouldn't have seen in Playboy. Agent Triple P had a series of redhead/natural blonde girlfriends in the late seventies and early eighties and most of them, we recollect, kept their pale strands on their upper legs. We liked the visual effect of when these hairs caught the sunlight, we have to say, and wish that the American anti-hair brigade hadn't set the current "body hair is bad" international standard. Perhaps one of the reasons we like German girls so much...
Talking of Germany, one of the types of pictorial that Oui would often run was the "comedy" type wherein some undressed young ladies would find themselves interacting with some men in a lighthearted situation. No serious voyeuristic passion in these just mildly erotic froth (Playboy would do this too, from time to time). One of the more bizarre examples of this could be found in Oui's October issue which featured an Adolph Hitler lookalike in a story about Hitler's time in Paris (called, inevitably, Springtime for Hitler). A strange concept, to say the least, but this picture is the first manifestation of any S&M in any of the major magazines.
US version
Once before the US edition of Penthouse had cropped the image of the cover girl used on the UK edition to remove a visible nipple but for the October issue the nature of the composition didn't allow for this so, for the first time, the US and UK editions had completely different pictures of Pet of the Year Patricia Barrett.
UK version
That month's Pet, Francis Cannon was depicted in a picture that combined all the elements that Guccione had been pushing the barriers on. So we get Miss Cannon full frontal with spread legs and stroking her pussy, in the most explicit shot so far. The knee length socks help too!
Francis was described in the magazine as a "wealthy landowner's daughter" (Guccione liked to have posh girls in his magazine). As we have seen, however, most of these statements had to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, in this case it was true as would come out several years later. Her real name was the Hon. Fiona Caroline Mary Watson the daughter of Joseph Rupert Eric Robert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton. In early 1976 her boyfriend, one Patrick Anderson, remembers getting a phone call from the
Daily Mail’s legendary gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster, who asked him “What do you think of Prince Charles going out with your girlfriend?” It was news to him! He immediately reacted saying he’d "have words with the fellow's mother!" This was then quoted in Dempster’s article as was the fact that his nickname for her was "Yum-yum".
Yum yum. The lushly aristocratic Miss Watson
Of course, Miss Watson immediately became pursued by reporters from all the newspapers, especially as Prince Charles was supposed to have had another girlfriend at the time. It all ended, of course, when the fact that she had posed for
Penthouse three years earlier became known.
Penthouse celebrated by publishing more pictures of her, of course.
A splendidly constructed young lady her former boyfriend, the unfortunate Patrick Anderson, later said, when interviewed on TV about what became known as the “Yum-yum affair”: "Yummy, as I say, was jolly well put together!"
Also that month we got a pictorial of Dutch model Julianna van Troost photographed by Jean-Yves Haydar (1939-1996) who wasn't one of Penthouse's regular photographers. He would do one more shoot for them, however, for July 1977's Pet of the Month, Christine Davray, who was his wife and would go on to find fame as a singer and actress in Turkey.
Two of Julianna's photos are noteworthy. In the top one the silhouette of her labia are just visible and in the second one her divided mound and labia are visible.
Penthouse had been disguising its models bits for years but now they were gradually emerging from the shadows!
Playboy's covers continued to be racier than before with this Mario Casilli picture of Anne Randell flashing a tiny bit of nipple.
Inside, we got Playboy's first post-pubic redheaded centrefold in the delightful shape of Monica Tidwell and her ginger strands.
Oui's November cover presented their first fully nude cover girl sprawled on a bed with the magazine's title conveniently covering her bottom.
That month's centrefold Ingrid (they often didn't bother with last names at all and sometimes didn't allocate
any name to their models) presented a nicely soapy pussy and, also displayed some inner thigh hair as well.
US edition
Penthouse went for completely different covers for their US and UK editions for November. This time not only was the picture different, as in the previous month, but they featured different girls. For some reason they had completely different Pets that month and this would happen occasionally over the next year or so. It wasn't just that the editions were a little out of synch, as sometimes happened, with a Pet (usually) appearing in the US edition one month before the UK edition, but the UK started to feature quite different girls. Sometimes a girl who had been a Pet in one edition would later resusface as a model in the other but sometimes they wouldn't cross the Atlantic at all.
UK edition
The UK edition had, as its Pet and cover girl that Month, a lady they called Olivia Elliot. There is no way, at that time, that the US would have had such a breast-revealing cover. In the UK, its only comparatively recently that nipples have been banned from being displayed in newsagents and now mens' magazines have to have a plastic cover. Strange, that we have gone backwards.
"Olivia" in Sweden
Also going under the name Olivia Paddon, Rose and Lenka this particular girl appeared in many of the main men's magazines on both sides of the Atlantic: Men Only (1973), Playboy (1975), Genesis (1976), Mayfair (1974 and 1976) to name but a few. She was also very visible in European magazines as well.
Meanwhile, back across the pond the Pet that
Penthouse in the US fielded in November was a young lady called Debbie Griffin who possesed an awesomely bush pussy and was also, incidentally, the first Pet to have been photographed in a swimming pool.
Genesis carried on in its singular habit of packing all its naked ladies into the centre section of the magazine.
The centrefold for November was Linda who was photographed by Ralph Hampton showing a little hint of her labia.
In December
Oui ran a pictorial (shot by Jeanloup Sieff) that was so popular it actually produced a sequel the following year.
An afternoon with Aunt Nancy had an older woman seducing her nephew. The lady (French model Denise Rolland) was dressed in Belle Epoque clothes, including some splendid underwear and ankle boots.
A complete period setting had been most impressively created for their, not really very naughty, goings on, demonstrating the attention to detail that went into some of these period-set confections by the likes of
Oui and
Penthouse in the seventies. We can't imagine a man's magazine bothering these days.
1973 came to a close with
Playboy still giving the impression that they were prepared to match
Penthouse pussy for pussy. Latterly, that year, however
Penthouse, which had just used pubic hair itself as the battleground was moving on to self touching and even faint glimpses of labia. Would
Playboy follow?
Their year ended with Playboy's first spread-legs Playmate, Christine Maddox sprawled on a fur coat in a way that, up until now, only Penthouse had shown. The sexing up of Playboy was accelerating!
Gallery, meanwhile was putting their first hint of rosy nipple on the cover of their December issue in the person of Judy Truve.
Inside they had this young lady spread, in every sense, across two pages and posing for a faux masturbation shot which was actually stronger then anything
Penthouse had done to date.
We have already seen the girl that
Penthouse UK called Olivia Elliott when she turned up as Pet of the Month in November. Now, one month later the same girl turned up as
Gallery's centrefold with a series of photos where she is is displaying engagingly fuzzy armpits. Something to do with the hippy vibe, perhaps.
Penthouse's final Pet of 1973, Sandy Robertson, was unique in that she was the only Pet to be photographed in her pictorial with a man. This was an experiment that
Penthouse didn't repeat, although we have already seen something similar in
Oui; although they received a lot of critical letters about it and stopped putting men in their centrefolds.
Sandy gets hers felt for her
Was this a case of Penthouse copying something from the Playboy stable for once? After this Penthouse kept the boy/girl interaction to their separate "love-sets". With this picture Penthouse, which had spent the year getting their models to touch their own pubic hair had someone else doing it to them for the first time. This hadn't been shown in any of the previous girl/girl or boy/girl pictorials.
There was another very subtle hint of labia in a pictorial featuring Tracey Sullivan, photographed by Ralph Nelson. The final pictorial in the magazine is one that got Penthouse into trouble and not for the glimpse of the lady's mound which is visible from underneath in a pose that we hadn't seen before.
Penthouse named her as Helga Schiller but when she discovered her pictures had appeared in Penthouse the 26 year old German model and actress, real name Marlene Appelt, went to the press in disgust. She said that she had posed for photographer Michael Holtz but objected to her pictures being sold to Penthouse. "I was paid a piddling fee, and I was never informed that I was to be sold to Penthouse. If Michael had told me, I would never have given permission, since I consider Penthouse a pornographic magazine." she said grumpily from her hometown of Munich.
Marlene from the Girls of Munich
A strange assertion given that, as we have seen, the level of explicitness in all the major magazines at this time was about the same. In fact Marlene had already appeared in Playboy in their Girls of Munich feature in August 1972 where she had been photographed in Bavaria by Pomeo Posar.
Pompeo gets some bounce out of Marlene in Bavaria
It was her appearance in that pictorial that got her the cover and the centrefold for Oui's November issue. Marlene was discovered by Italian photographer Franco Rubartelli, who had also discovered Verushka, who she looks remarkable similar to.
Marlene on the cover of Oui: November 1972
Time magazine, for December 3rd 1973, focussed on the fact that Penthouse had always said that it didn't use models who had posed nude elsewhere and that they should give their real names for publication. In fact, whilst this may have been the case when Penthouse started we have already seen that many (most) of the models used an assumed name. Also, Penthouse had only ever maintained that the Pet of the Month should not have posed nude before, not the other girls who appeared in the magazine but, again, even this wasn't true by this time. We suspect the real problem was the fact that she didn't receive any more money for appearing in such a high circulation magazine!
In the next episode we will look at 1974, when the Pubic Wars really started to hot up!
