Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars Part 10 1978 part 4

For the second time that year Playboy went for a celebrity cover.  This time Dolly Parton was quite happy to don the bow tie and tails which Barbra Streisand had been uncomfortable about wearing on her previous cover.

The first pictorial that month featured Denise Creedon, who was involved in working on a film with British born sculptor John Perry, who was just starting to raise awareness of the damage that was being done to the world's whale and dolphin population.  Denise was experienced in swimming with dolphins which she said she invariably did nude, luckily for Playboy.  It wasn't all watery action though, Richard Fegley included this fine and revealing study of Miss Creedon in a hammock.

Marcy (left) with Joanna (Bladerunner) Cassidy in The Roller Girls

Playmate of the Month, Marcy Hanson, had already appeared in the short lived sit com The Roller Girls, playing the marvelously named Honey Bee Novak.  Her pictorial included a shot of her in action from that show, which only lasted four episodes.   She appeared in TV and film for the next twenty years and still works as a model.

Her pictorial contained this rather splendid  soapy shot of her perched on the edge of a bathtub.

Marcy's centrefold features her in these rather peculiar see though shorts.  She later said that while she was happy to pose naked she thought the shorts were "perverted".  She locked herself in her dressing room and refused to come out until photographer Mario Casilli put them on himself!

Playboy continued their examination of students from the Pac 10 colleges in the West of the US.   Beth Funner (and I am sure she was) from Washington State was studying animal science so perhaps that's why they put her in a barn.  Whether it was her choice to flash her bits we don't know.  Don't frighten the horses!

Also from Washington State was Toni Turner who seemed happy to pose in this sensuous self-caressing shot.  The accompanying article mentioned that May 8th was National Outdoors Intercourse Day at the College.  It has been suggested that this excellent sounding tradition started in 1960 and is still being celebrated at Washington State today.  Whether either of these two young ladies participated in this will have to be left to the imagination.

The final pictorial that month was one of Playboy's regular looks at a sexy foreign film; although in this case they didn't have to go very far from home for the Canadian In Praise of Older Women (1978).  This was the very first film to be screened at the now world famous Toronto Film Festival and was a major hit in Canada with Helen Shaver picking up a local best actress award for it.  Here Shaver and Tom Berenger get close.  Oddly, although Shaver's character was supposed to be older than Berenger's, he was 29 at the time and she was 27.  An experienced actress as well as a director Shaver is still working regularly.  In Tremors 2 (1996) she played a Playboy Playmate!

Her love scene with Patricia Charbonneau (bottom) in Desert Hearts (1985) is still one of the most erotic lesbian scenes in mainstream cinema, without really being explicit.  The kissing is sensational!

Swank was something of a throwback, in many ways, originating as it did from a nineteen forties publication that shared a family tree with the Marvel Comics group.  It was more literary than most of its second or third tier men's magazines competitors and its new editor had come, in 1977, from Esquire. Capable of showing pussy pictures as explicit as anything other than Hustler. it also often featured pictorials that could have come from much earlier in the seventies; so Bobbi here would have been right at home in a 1972 Penthouse.

Whether it was something to do with the release of Pretty Baby we don't know but there were a number of
Lolita type pictorials at the time, which now make for rather queasy viewing.  "I'm not as young as I look but I'm not as old as I act either," began Allison's pictorial.  Her petite body meant that she looked younger than her years (she would have had to be eighteen in the US, unlike Britain where sixteen and seventeen year olds had been used as models by the likes of Penthouse and Mayfair) but the addition of childish accessories like the teddy bear and the recorder contributed to the dubious atmosphere.  Slightly creepy.

Despite her fashion model-style cover shot, Nancy Suiter was actually a glamour model and future porn star, unlike the much more conventional models who had appeared on the cover of Oui of late.

The first lady that issue was Jacqueline shot by Francis Giacobetti who was a prototypical European looking, small busted, leggy, pouty Oui girl.

Cover girl Nancy Suiter, at nineteen just starting a brief career that would continue into the next decade, gives us one of Oui's most explicit pussy shots for some time.

Nancy bravely prepares to take on John Holmes in Taxi Girls

Suiter appeared in her first hardcore film, The Ecstasy Girls (1979) the following year and gave a number of notably enthusiastic performances in films like 800 Fantasy Lane and Taxi Girls the same year.

She appeared in most of the major US, British and Continental men's magazines into the early eighties showing of her petite body and genuinely beautiful face.  Happy to do softcore or hardcore photo sessions we will see her again as the Pubic Wars moves into the early eighties.

Nothing is known about her (although Oui said she was from Ft Lauderdale, Florida) as she appeared to come from nowhere and, apparently, never discussed her background with her co-workers.  Just as mysteriously she disappeared from the scene in the early eighties and was never heard from again.

Various theories exist as to Suiter's fate, from marrying a millionaire (who stopped her working in the industry) to being murdered, dying in an accident or descending into drugs and prostitution and dying of an overdose.  We hope her fate was a happy one as she was a lovely girl whose face we well remember from magazines at the time and whose body shape reminded Triple P of a number of his girlfriends from around this period.

More labia on display, in several pictures, with Oui's third girl that month, the darkly enticing Angelica, photographed by Jeff Dunas.

Finally, Oui had a boy/girl set called Cockpit photographed by Graham Henman and featuring a man and a woman in an old plane.  The man suffered from too many "comedy" expressions and an unwillingness to take off his clothes but the young lady had a sensational bottom, as we can see.  Henman was a British photographer who settled in California and became a film director.  He currently owns a special effects house as well as a top end guitar manufacturer.

There was still plenty of pussy and brazenly displayed rear ends in Paul Raymond's Club: much more so than the UK's Men Only, which was the source of the magazine's photo sets.  The Club pictorials, often with a few more explicit photos tended to appear a few months after the same pictorials appeared in Men Only in Britain.

This girl, who also appeared under the name of Mireille, was one of Triple P's absolute favourites of the seventies.  The French maid's costume is an added bonus!

The cover of Penthouse for October previewed the "1st Space-age magazine".  This was Bob Guccione's wife Kathy Keeton's new brainchild Omni: a magazine which mixed hard science, sf and fantasy fiction and the paranormal. It continued for nearly twenty years, ceasing publication after the death of Keeton in 1997.  This issue of Penthouse reflected Omni's content with articles on science fiction, cars of the future and a story set in 1985 by Anthony Burgess.

 I think he's about to land on Uranus...

In keeping with the SF theme the opening pictorial by Earl Miller was another space-themed one featuring two alarmingly bald young ladies molesting an astronaut, supposedly set on the planet Nymphon.

Nothing spaced out about that October's Pet of the Month, Veronique De Valdene from France.   She did have a remarkably bushy pussy, though, even for the time.  Again, she disappeared after this appearance.

The final heavenly body belonged to English Pet of the Month from July 1975, Jane Hargrave in her third appearance in the magazine.  Guccione claimed she was the most beautiful girl he had ever photographed, which is saying something.  The daughter of a painter she was born in Chelsea.  At the age of eighteen she moved to New York to live in Bob Guccione's house there where she stayed for five years.  After appearing in Caligula she worked as a top model for another ten years, being photographed by the likes of David Bailey and Lord Lichfield.  She is now a talented artist in her own right.

Hustler continued with its sex-themed covers with this effectively anonymised example.

The first pictorial was odd even for Hustler.  Entitled The Rape of Justice the text talks about those who have enslaved freedom, from the Spanish Inquisition through the Nazis to the CIA (Larry Flynt still believed that his recent shooting was conducted by the latter rather than, as now seems likely, by a lone, crazed racist).  The pictures illustrate a leather-clad and studded Death, sporting a nasty looking spiked erection, and a pale Justice.

There was more conventionally depicted sex in the centrefold pictorial, Hard Day's Work by Clive McLean. Again, they put the man into the centrefold despite (or perhaps because of) the increasing number of protesting letters to the magazine.  One woman wrote in, however, to say that  while her husband had drooled over Carla (see below) she had "drooled over those beautiful buns in the centerfold.  How about a photo of a guy with hard cock and a big, hairy ass?"   

Bambi Woods in Debbie Does Dallas

The young lady in Hard Day's Work is none other than Bambi Woods, start of the hugely popular porn film Debbie Does Dallas (1978), in one of her very few magazine appearances.  Owing money to a girlfriend her friend said she could make $1000 a day making a porn film.  In the end she only got $350 a day but the film went onto be one of the most successful X-rated films of all time.  About a group of girls going to Dallas to try to win a place in the newly famous Dallas Cowgirls cheerleading squad the producers were sued by the Dallas Cowboys for using a costume too close to the original, although Woods once said it was different as they "left the fringes off".  A combination of the catchy title, the publicity surrounding the court case and the publicity which depicted Miss Woods (actually she had been married and divorced by the time she was seventeen) in her cheerleader's costume made the film a massive hit..

Woods in her only other known magazine pictorial

Woods said that she didn't enjoy filming the sex scenes, because she didn't like being watched, but she needed the money.  She also used to perform as a stripper for cash.  She made two other Debbie Does Dallas films and then disappeared.  It has been said that she died of a drugs overdose in 1986 and in 2005 Channel 4 in the UK tried to confirm her fate, unsuccessfully, for an interview for their documentary The Dark Side of Porn.  More recently several interviews have emerged purporting to be with the lady who may or may not have really been called Barbara Woodson.  Another mystery!

There is no mystery about the dusky appeal of the only solo girl in the issue, Carla.  Photographed by James Baes she poses suggestively, if not very subtly, with a banana.  What can she be thinking about?

November's Playboy featured the face-covering Playmate of the Month Monique St. Pierre in a photograph by Tom Staebler.

A few years ago this pose was recreated in a plastic sculpture by Paul Pope for  limited edition art firm Kidrobot.  Strange but cute!

The first pictorial was one of the now regular annual revue of Bunnies from the Playboy clubs.  In the 1978 edition the girls showed a bit less than they had in the previous few years, although Bernie McCool from the Dallas club did flash her pussy.  Playboy advised readers to keep checking the centrefold as "she's Playmate material", but she never was.

German born Playmate, the really quite superb, Monique St Pierre was already a model and told Playboy she had signed with the Wilhelmina modelling agency in New York.

Unfortunately, as soon as the agency saw her pictorial in the magazine she was sacked.  She forgot the New York career and went back to Playboy where she got involved in the launch of Playboy TV.  We will see more of her when we look at 1979.

The annual Sex in Cinema feature returned with rather less explicit pictures than usual but it did include this shot of Marilu Tolo and Anthony Quinn in The Greek Tycoon (1978).  Marilu had been the Penthouse Pet of the Month in the UK edition of Penthouse in October 1969 although she wasn't the centrefold in the US edition.

November also saw the first edition of Playboy's Spanish edition, although as their first centrefold they used Miss December 1976 Karen Hafter. Spain had only recently relaxed its censorship laws so the inclusion of this shot of Karen in their first issue sent out a strong message.  Like most foreign editions the magazine used a mixture of US material and locally shot European  pictures.

By the early-mid eighties when Playboy in the US had almost completely abandoned the depiction of its models labia the Spanish version was using much more explicit material to supplement the softer American shots.  This lesbian set from October 1983 and the girl on the chair from April 1983, for example, would have been more at home of the pages of Penthouse than in US Playboy.

The November cover of Oui features the utterly gorgeous British model Carolyn Evans photographed by John Kelly.  We looked at her more closely in the last post of the Pubic Wars where she had appeared as Dixie Ann in Penthouse in August.

The Openings section of Oui carried all their short item snippets and, possibly trailing the cheerleaders pictorial to come in sister magazine Playboy, included this wide open shot of delightfully knickerless cheerleaders.  When Triple P was a teenager watching the young ladies on the playing field at the girls school next door this is just what we wanted to see when they practised their cartwheels on the grass. Never did, of course!

Leslie, photographed by David Finch, gives us this enticing rear view shot showing that labia were making a comeback in the pages of Oui.

Carolyn Evans was the centrefold girl that month and she too flashes a lot more than she often did in the UK magazines.

More luscious labia as well from the elegant Martine as photographed by S. Carter (whoever that may have been).

The final pictorial for Oui's November issue was another rather tame boy/girl shoot. The only notable thing about it is the fact that it was photographed at The Palm restaurant in West Hollywood.  This branch of the venerable New York steak house opened in 1975, three years before the pictorial, and rapidly became a favourite Hollywood hangout, as it remains today.  There's even one in London now, the only branch outside the US and Mexico.

Triple P has even had lunch at the West Hollywood restaurant, taken there by his movie industry Taiwanese-American friend S.  We hadn't realised that our table might have had this naked young lady squirming about on it as her friend performed unconvincing, fake cunnilingus.

November's Penthouse had January 1978's Pet of the Month, Carrie Nelson on the cover, photographed by Stan Malinowski, from a lingerie fashion shoot inside.

It was Pet of the Year issue and so we had fourteen pages of Dominique Maure shot by Bob Guccione.  Dominique displayed her fleshy labia a lot more than in her original pictorial in June 1977. This final, probing shot is pretty strong for the time, even for Penthouse.

5' 11" tall Dominique, from Saskatchewan in Canada, did a lot of PR work for Penthouse and worked as a spokesperson for the MOMO/Penthouse racing car team.  She was discovered at seventeen by a photographer looking for a swimsuit model and was soon one of Canada's top models appearing in Cosmopolitan and French Vogue.  Her real name is Dottie Meyer and she stayed at Penthouse for decades, eventually becoming director of corporate promotions.  She was in her early thirties by the time she posed for this pictorial; definitely a woman not a girl.

Pet of the Month, Norwegian born Malia Redford was a comparatively petite 5'3" tall.  Her pictorial was shot in Hawaii by Ken Johannsen.  It also included a number of stronger than usual faux masturbation shots , such as this pussy probing example.

Even more extreme was her centrefold picture which is the first example in Penthouse of a Pet of the Month spreading her moist-looking labia in the style of Hustler.

Francis (left bottom), Nelson (blonde) and Zullo

The final pictorial combined Penthouse's usual fashion feature with a three girl Love Set.  Featuring various items of lingerie, the details of which were given in what would now be known as an advertorial, Carrie Nelson (January 1978), Deborah Zullo (November 1977) and Paula Francis (June 1973) indulged in some very touchy-feely posing.

Although the lingerie is nicely displayed (complete with prices and ordering details) sometimes photographer Stan Malinowski forgets what he is supposed to be promoting and just features the girls in completely naked Love Set style poses.

Here is Nancy Suiter again in Lary Flynt's November Chic.

We don't think we have featured the US edition of Club International before.  Another Paul Raymond production it was launched in the US in December 1976 following on from Club, the Americanised version of Men Only, which had appeared in February 1975.   Raymond asked his trusted lieutenant, former journalist Tony Power, to oversee the launch of Club and Club International in the US, encouraging him with a 10% profit share which soon saw his monthly pay cheque rise to £30,000 a month.

Nicole by Fanny

Raymond, of course, had tried to launch a men's magazine in the UK with King in 1964.  Very much basing it on Playboy, whose UK distribution was still very patchy, it justified its rather tame topless women (which were still too strong for major British Newsagent WH Smiths to take the magazine) with a great deal of literary content.

The first issue of King, 1964

King predated Bob Guccione's Penthouse by six months and we suspect it was no coincidence that Guccione highlighted his equally stellar collection of writers on his first issue's cover.  Originally conceived as a quarterly, Raymond decided to take King monthly for February 1965 but it wasn't generating the sort of return he wanted and he was uncomfortable with the upmarket approach so sold it after the third edition.

Natalie by George Marquand

Raymond had another go in 1971, having seen Guccione introduce pubic hair to Penthouse without the expected prosecution for indecency.  He bought the struggling Men Only whose circulation had dropped to 35,000 copies a month for £12,000.  Relaunching it in June 1971 as a big, bright, heavily pubic focussed  publication with no literary pretensions at all, editor in chief Tony Power often used girls from the Raymond Revuebar as models in the early days.

US edition

UK edition

The photo of Lola by Adam Cole (above) comes from Club International's UK edition from Volome 7 number 9 (September 1978), from which many of the US edition's November 1978 pictorials came.   It can be seen how far the UK editions had backed off from showing clear shots of their models genitals in comparison with the US version.  Another distinctive feature of the US edition of Club International at this time was that it didn't have any text to  accompany the pictorials. 

Lola (Cheryl in the UK edition) by Rupert Daines

In just over a year Power had increased the circulation of Men Only by more than ten times to 400,000 a month.  This was enough to allow Raymond to launch his second all-new magazine since King, Club International.  In Britain this was considered visually even more explicit than Men Only and when Power took it to the US by 1978 it was using pictures that would have been unpublishable in the UK.  Club International, by 1978, was the fifth highest circulation men's magazine in America, behind Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and its stablemate Club; something of an achievement for a foreign publisher.

Karen in Club International UK

Karen in Club International US 

Above top we have Karen, shot by Fanny, as she appeared in Club International in the UK in September 1978 and underneath as she appeared in the US version two months later.  The amazingly assertive display of her prominent anus has been almost completely eliminated in the UK version and, in addition to which, the UK picture was only a quarter of a page compared with the full page in the US version.

Hustler's November cover featured the distinctive charms of Joyce Gibson, about whom you can read more in our posts on one of her Penthouse pictorials, here.

The first pictorial, Yen for Love by Clive Mclean, was, Hustler said, in the style of Japanese pillow books (Shunga) those visually explicit sex guides given to newly married couples.  More letters of protest followed in the January 1979 issue.   "I just want to say that your recent incorporation of male-female photographs sucks!  I don't care what anyone else says, but the sight of some hairy ape fondling a luscious piece of meat isn't very appetizing,"  wrote James Hill of Ohio.  Over the next few months the magazine carried a host of letters both for (largely from women) and against.  One letter purported to be from a lesbian who complained that reading a magazine featuring naked men might make people think she was straight!  Now, of course, all of these letters may have been made up the editorial staff and, indeed, many of the pro-couples letters did seem to follow the Larry Flynt philosophy that depicting naked couples having sex shouldn't be seen as obscene.  However, many of the arguments did echo the discussion that took place on the pages of Oui four years earlier; principally that looking at naked men was gay.

One part of the pro-couples camp felt that the magazine wasn't going far enough and complained about the lack of erections on the part of the male models.  "All your photo-spreads show limp dicks dangling in midair. Pictorials like this make you look like a bunch of phonies...either get it up and stick it in or take it out of your magazine," said George Whittingham, also from Ohio.  Hustler was, no doubt, following the 45 degree "angle of dangle" rule initially used in Playgirl and Bob Guccione's Viva which meant that provided the penis was only semi-erect and not vertical then they were probably (just) within the bounds of what, at that time, would have been considered obscenity.  This outtake from Yen for Love shows that, not surprisingly given the loveliness of his partner, the gentleman involved did reach full tumescence during the shoot even though it couldn't be shown in the magazine.  

This month, however, there was no man in the centrefold, just the delightfully damp looking Sheila, photographed by Suze Randall.  We were formatting the pictures for this post in South America last month with the "help" of our particular friend, S, from Vancouver.  Deciding which of the images from this pictorial to use in this post we were struck by the young lady's bunches. "You can't beat a girl with bunches," we opined.  "Yes, you can.  If she's been really, really naughty!" ventured S in reply, who then wore her hair in bunches (complete with pink ribbons) for much of the rest of the fortnight.  Thwack!

The final pictorial that month was another couples one but one with a twist.  Perhaps inspired by Playboy's not dissimilar pictorial featuring Barbara Carrera the previous year, Beauty's Beast, by James Baes, featured another curious beastman who discovers a lovely in the desert.  This leads to the usual "limp dick" posturing, although this open mouthed pose by the lovely young lady generates rather more erotic frisson than usual.

The special beastman make-up was done by Hollywood's Rick Schwartz, who had worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the short-lived Planet of the Apes TV series.  

More relevantly he also worked, that year, on Fairy Tales (1978) an adult (but not pornographic) film version of Sleeping Beauty which featured Queen of the "B"s Linnea Quigley, former Penthouse and Hustler model Lindsay Freeman as Jill (above with Jeff Doucette as Jack) and even Martha (Dancing in the Street) Reeves who didn't know she was appearing in an adult film until she took her church group to see it!

Beauty irrigates the desert 

It was the title spread that caused the letters, however.  "I've just got to find out for sure.  Is the girl in Beauty's Beast really taking a pee?  I mean, it looks real enough, but since that's the first piss shot I've seen in Hustler, I assumed maybe you had to simulate the action," wrote someone from Boston.  

"The photo of beauty taking a good healthy piss gave me an instant hard-on. I'd like to see more of this kind of picture..." said yet another reader from Ohio.

"Our photo editor assures you that Beauty did, in fact relieve, herself during the shooting session," replied Hustler and included another photo of the young lady in mid flow for good measure.  This was nearly twenty years before Bob Guccione included a pissing pussy in Penthouse, despite him claiming that he had pioneered this type of picture in mainstream men's magazines.

You don't get any celebrity Playboy covers for decades and then a whole lot appear all at once.  Here is girl of the moment Farrah Fawcett-Majors trumpeting her return to Charlie's Angels.  Farrah, who was one of those women who got more attractive the older she got, would later pose for Playboy wearing considerably less but at this point in her career kept her clothes on.  Still, this was their sexiest celebrity cover to date.

From left: Debbie Kepley, Charyl, Linda, Janice Garner and Meg Rossi

The first pictorial was due to cause more of a ruckus, however. You would have thought that cheerleaders would have been such an obvious target for a magazine like Playboy that they would have done something before this issue's 12 page feature on NFL football team cheerleaders.  However until 1976 cheerleaders were homely girls in comparatively modest clothes and it was only in 1976 that the hot pants wearing Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders changed all that. So, by 1978 cheerleaders had become the new sex symbols of America. Containing a mixture of clothed action shots (which the NFL teams objected to) and some rather more unclothed poses (which they objected to even more) the pictorial opened with this shot of some Dallas Cowgirls cheerleaders.

Rather more sensuous was this Arny Freytag shot of San Diego cheerleader Elizabeth Caleca, the winner of Miss Nude California in 1977 and runner-up for Miss Nude USA.  However, her appearance was to have grave consequences as the Chargers sacked the entire 20 woman squad of Chargettes as a result, although the club claimed it was because the girls were doing paid appearances in their uniforms.  Maybe if they'd actually paid them (most cheerleaders earned $15 a game but the Chargettes got nothing) it might have helped.   All in all nearly fifty girls lost their positions on the squads of six teams.  Playboy knew a good controversy when it saw it and we will see many of the girls again in a follow-up pictorial the following year.

Playmate of the Month, Texan Janet Quist, wasn't posing quite as naughtily as Miss Caleca but had this nice shot by Ken Marcus in her pictorial, which showcased the curves and planes of her splendid body.  Quist was one of 11 finalists in the Playboy's Playmate Photo contest whose results had been announced in August the previous year.  She was the only one who became a Playmate, however.

Playboy, like Penthouse the previous month, also had a lingerie pictorial, which included this fine two girl bondage picture.

The Sex Stars annual feature, which had recently shown some pretty explicit pictures, was dialed back for 1978 and this photo of porn superstar Serena BlaqueLord (Robinson) and her boyfriend Jamie Gillis was as naughty as they got.

A two page pictorial on the Peter Bogdanovich film Saint Jack included this assertive picture of Singaporean actress Cecilia Arriola wearing a pair of tights with no knickers.  It was the first film shot in Singapore for twenty years and had to be done using guerrilla film methods.  It is a fine film and is a wonderful record of a lost, pre-skyscraper, Singapore.

The more modest approach to the depiction of its Playmates seen in Playboy, as 1978 drew to a close, was not necessarily being demonstrated elsewhere in the Playboy empire.

Playboy Italia had originally reused the American Playmates for its pictorials, supplemented by a few local models and actresses.  At the beginning of 1978, however, they switched to almost exclusively home grown centrefolds as well as more in the way of subsidiary girls.  Here, from the December 1978 edition is Mimi, clearly showing her anus.

In the same issue we got the Playmate review which included this shot of Playmate of the Month for July, Alice Gherardi, in the sort of shot we hadn't seen for some time in the US edition.

If we go back to her July 1978 Playmate pictorial we can see that Alice is flashing a lot of spread pussy; almost to a Penthouse level.

Cover girl Lenka Novak had already appeared in Playboy as the subject of the winner of their 1977 photography competition,  You can read about her brief film career here.

Mario Casilli's photographs of the first model for the December issue had Ann just flashing her clitoral hood in the sort of picture Penthouse had been showing in 1974 but which had latterly been disappearing from Oui.

Centrefold Toni went back to the earlier Oui practice of having modest pictures in her pictorial but the most explicit one in her centrefold, as photographed here by Grant Edwards.

Lori was photographed by Laura Bergman flashing her behind in the water in a fairly assertive way.

Instead of a couples pictorial that month Oui brought back two former cover girls: top British models Jilly Johnson and Nina Carter who were enjoying a brief period of fame outside the modelling arena as manufactured pop duo Blonde on Blonde.They had already appeared together in sister magazine Lui in April and the Oui pictorial used some of the same shots.

A picture disc of their Asian smash 

They didn't exactly set the music world alight in the UK although they did get a number one in Japan.  They probably had more publicity pictures taken than record sales!  They continued performing together until 1980.  The year after this Oui pictorial  they appeared as Blonde on Blonde in dreadful disco-era British/Hong Kong produced thriller The Golden Lady (1979) which was the first X (18) rated film we saw at the cinema.  It also starred British based Hungarian glamour model Ava Cadell as the first full frontal woman Triple P had seen on the big screen.  The only memorable thing about it!

Oui December 1978

This picture of Johnson from that month's edition of Oui is the most explicit one Triple P has ever seen of her.  Although she had been a regular Page 3 girl for The Sun since 1972 and was the Daily Mirror's first topless equivalent, most of her poses were fairly modest by the standards of the time. 

She did appear on a number of men's magazines covers even if, perhaps, she wasn't actually featured inside. Here she is on the cover of December 1975's Club International.

Lui April 1976

Probably the most sensual pictorial she had done up until this point was the one she did for Lui in April 1976.

Australian born Jilly first appeared in Page 3  in 1973 but she stopped posing for The Sun for a time in 1977 to concentrate on Blonde on Blonde, before returning to Page 3 for the period 1980 until 1983.  Altogether she racked up 80 appearances in this British national institution.  Her slim ballet and athletics honed 34-24-34 figure was not typical of some of the later bustier Page 3 girls.

Like many of the British glamour models of the time her image was used on record and paperback covers; here for a James Hadley Chase novel.

What she did have was world class legs which seemed to make up a good proportion of her 5'8" frame.  Born in 1953 she went to school in Woking, only a few miles from where Agent Triple P lives now.

Jilly Johnson June 2013

She wrote a novel in 1994 and made some TV and film appearances.  Now a housewife and grandmother to eleven she'll be sixty in November.  Only last week she appeared in the Daily Mail modelling swimsuits and looked still very much worthy of serious attention.

Nina's first Page 3 shot, February 1972

The second half of the duo, Nina Carter, was born, with the considerably less glamourous name of Penny Mallett, in Solihull in 1951.   Her initial modelling jobs were under her real name but she soon changed it.  

As Penny Mallett she appeared in Mayfair several times and was so popular she made a short film for them where she could be seen in an exciting see-through swimsuit.

Page 3 November 1976

First appearing as a Page 3 girl in The Sun on 5th February 1972 she went on to have many appearances in this and other tabloid newspapers.

Nina Carter Oui December 1978

An early shot in her big hair phase

She appeared in rather more men's magazines than Jilly and did more full frontal work but always posed decorously.  Again, her Oui shot from this issue is probably the most explicit one she did.

 Nina, right

Nina, top

Here she appears in a light lesbian pictorial which is certainly further than Jilly Johnson went.  During their Blonde on Blonde days they had to deal with accusations that they were lesbians as they were often posed naked together.  They weren't but their publicists didn't exactly discourage the image.

Nina also appeared on the cover of Corgi books James Hadley Chase novels as well as trashy record covers.

Nina with Rick Wakeman

After being contacted by him about singing on a backing track in the early eighties Nina met Yes keyboard whizz Rick Wakeman and she married him in 1984.  They were together until 2004 when they divorced.  In the interim she battled drug addiction and anorexia but recently married again.

 Nina in 2011

Now sixty, Nina still looks sensational and is also a very glamorous grandmother.  Recently she has been in the news for saying, surprisingly, that Page 3 girls should be banned, arguing that the world is a very different place for women now compared with the more innocent seventies.

Nina and Jilly 2010

The two remain close friends and Jilly recently attended Nina's wedding to a surgeon.

In these days of (sadly) almost ubiquitously hairless pussies it is hard to imagine the novelty of a pictorial featuring the shaving of a woman's nether regions.  There had been one or two pieces (notably in Bob Guccione's women's magazine Viva) on pubic hair styling but it was very much the exception.

Cavalier went for a whole pussy shaving pictorial in its December issue called Barbered Pole (a rather limp pun as the lady being seen to was supposed to be of Polish extraction).  The most interesting thing about this rather poorly photographed piece is the bizarre feminist interpretation put on it by a later book on pornography. Called, with great originality, Pornography the authors attempts to impose their feminist views on what is a totally unimportant pictorial are laughable.

After a breathless page of description of the pictorial the piece continues: "The first woman is defined through age color and activity.  She is old in the male value system; beyond sexual desirability.  She is used, hardened, potentially dangerous yet performing a menial service.  Her proper role is to prepare, to groom a younger woman for sexual service....Both her servility and hostility to the white woman are articulated in the activity she performs, menial in relation to the white woman yet also potentially dangerous to her.  This is the classic situation of the racially degraded servant: her literal ability to hurt the one she serves is, in a moment absolute but she cannot survive beyond the literal act because her group is powerless, she will be destroyed and so she serves. 

Or maybe it's just an attempt to produce a series of erotic images focussing on the woman's pussy, at which it rather fails, we think.

No attempts at arty nonsense from Club that month.  As usual they just focussed on having lots of really beautiful (and mostly British) models flaunting their pussies and, of course, arseholes.  Centrefold Louise, lovingly captured on film by Barry Vincent, didn't show anything like as much in her original Men Only pictorial in Britain.

Hustler featured a couple on the cover for the fourth issue in a row but this would be the last occasion for nearly four years.

White Heat had the cover couple going through their simulated paces.  This shot of the very seventies looking gentleman dangling his penis between the young lady's breasts being, perhaps, the most potent photograph.  He is, of course, resolutely flaccid in every shot and, sadly, we haven't been able to find any outtakes to see if she got him going at any point.

For the second month running they returned to the solo girl centrefold as modelled here by the sun drenched Kari Clarke.

The final pictorial was also a couples one, set in a Mexican prison.  Here "Consuela" snuggles up to her boyfriend in his cell, having got the keys off the jailed by indulging in some simulated fellatio.  A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do!

Finally, for our last magazine of 1978, Penthouse's December issue featured something it had never had on the cover before: A man.  This, of course, was at the time that Hustler had had four months running of couples on its cover.  Still, Penthouse was taking a risk, given the negative responses Oui had got a few years earlier when they did the same thing.

The couple on the cover were from the pictorial inside by Earl Miller called A Touch of Class about a teacher who seduces his pupil.  This pussy probing shot is effectively and elegantly sexy.

The Pet of the Month pictorial was done by John Copeland at the very beginning of a relationship with Penthouse which would last until 1995 and would result in some extremely erotic images.  He got the elfin, balletic Amber Ramsey to pose for some very sexy pictures, which included a number of pussy touching ones such as these.

This one was the Pubic Wars barrier breaker for Penthouse, however, as Amber displays the first unequivocal, aroused, wet cunt in the magazine's history, thereby effectively catching up with the likes of Hustler.  We particularly respond to Amber as she looks very similar to a secretary that Triple P had  some years ago. 

Future Penthouse principal photographer Carl Wachter delivered only his second pictorial for the magazine with Desert Fox which continued the boy/girl theme from the cover.  Julie, photographed in the Mojave Desert, is depicted getting frisky with a young man before getting frisky with her knickers.  Not a boy/girl Love Set as such but obviously Penthouse felt they had to respond to Hustler's couple vibe.

The magazine also included a 1979 desk calendar which featured a lot of pussy stroking popsies such as Laura Storm here.  This is an appropriate point to finish and next time we will start our look at the last year of the seventies.

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