Ron Vogel (b. 1933) shot ten Playboy centrefolds between 1958 and 1968 as well as three covers for the magazine. Vogel was one of the top glamour photographers of the sixties and worked for over forty years, often doing the stills for a slew of low budget racy films.
Playmate of the Month was Lee Ann Michelle who was described as from Surrey, England (as is Agent Triple P). We bought this issue when we were working at Heathrow Airport between school and university. Delighted at having real money for the first time we stocked up on a different men's magazine every week from the newsagents in the dismal town of Stanwell next to the cargo terminal. We were amazed to see this picture of Lee Ann in front of Chertsey Bridge which was less than a mile from our family home!
Playboy was gradually moving away from revealed labia at this point but we did get this enticing shot by Mario Casilli of Lee Ann overflowing her lacy knickers.
Carol Needham came from Walton-on-Thames (Walton bridge is the next down the Thames from Chertsey Bridge depicted in her pictorial, above) and while walking down the King's Road in Chelsea was spotted by someone who suggested she should visit a modelling agency. She did and was sent by them to Beverly Goodway, Page 3 photographer for The Sun. Goodway knew two good things when he saw them and she appeared in her first Page 3 picture in January 1977 at the age of sixteen (which was still legal in the UK at the time) while she was still at school.
In 1977 she was in Los Angeles shooting a Hollywood themed calendar for British car parts manufacturer Unipart with John Kelly. He introduced her to Hugh Hefner who asked her to pose for the Playboy centrefold which she later said was one of her favourite pictures of herself.
Carol married top glamour photographer Harry Ormesher who shot many of her Starbird pictures for the Daily Star. Ormesher is now a racehorse breeder and had been the co-owner of The Iron Door Club in Liverpool, the first venue The Beatles played at under that name. He was about twice her age.
Apart from her tabloid appearances she appeared in many of the top men's magazines in the late seventies and early eighties; on rare occasions showing rather more than she did in Playboy.
Carol was a real beauty with an absolutely stunning body, even by
Playboy standards. Sadly she never made good on the wish expressed in her Playmate data sheet to be an actress. Her appearance in
Seven is her sole screen credit. She now runs a modelling agency.
The next pictorial for February's 1979 Playboy was The Girls of Las Vegas and even this was much more modest in the below the waist displays than similar features in the past, with only Carol Nicholson, a skater at the Hacienda Casino's ice show, flashing her Canadian beaver
The Year in Sex feature often had
Playboy pushing the visual boundaries more than in any other place in the magazine. Despite the retreat from previous year's explicitness there was still a pussy toying picture of disgraced San Diego Chargers cheerleader Elizabeth Caleca (who would also appear in the following month's issue).
More visually extreme was this picture of a young lady at the Ponderosa Sun Club Nudes-a-poppin festival. Although the picture takes up only a sixth of a page it is one of
Playboy's very few explicit anal shots.
Another fashion model on
Oui's February cover in the 5'8" from of leggy Linda Horn shot by
Playboy regular Phillip Dixon.
Oui's models were so beautiful that they could get away with a full page portrait, like this one of Bea by Erich Klemm. In fact many of these pictorials by continental photographers actually originated in the French Lui magazine.
Just to prove that pussy shots hadn't entirely disappeared from Oui we had Annika who also flashed her bits in the centrefold.
Another Peter Weissbrich pictorial for Brigitta, displaying her rear to great effect in this shot.
The final pictorial was a a boy/girl one set in Victorian times. It was severely lacking in passion and this was the best photograph of a dull bunch. This was a surprise as the photographer was Jeff Dunas who usually excelled at this sort of thing.
Genesis was like
Penthouse in 1975 with its use of soft-focus, except, like
Playboy the labia had vanished in a puff of soft focus mist and shadow. Margaret, shot by Diana Hardy, had a lovely bust though.
Gallery had their "girl next door" on the cover, in this case Andrea from Georgia, who like all the other monthly winners picked up a rather measly $500 for being the only girl in the magazine to flash her bits.
Joyce Slate from Tulsa (or so they would have you believe) hardly even showed her fluff let alone anything more, but Siwer Ohlsson produced this nicely composed shot just catching a fringe of fur from behind.
John Justin had his unnamed model strewn across a Ford Mustang and she gave the readers this one abandoned pussy touching shot on the bonnet. Or hood, as Americans would call it.
February's
Penthouse had featured a rare return by a previous Pet of the Month in this sensuous shot of December 1975's Susan Waide by Bob Guccione.
That month's love set was a period piece set in the nineteen thirties and shot by Earl Miller. It included the first male/female bondage photos in the magazine. The story behind it being that she is a rich girl kidnapped by a gangster for money. Of course, in the end she runs off with the gangster. The final faux fellatio shot was one of the stronger and more suggestive ones seen so far in the magazine. The girl is Marianne Walters, who would later go on to be a porn star as Kelly Nichols. We will see more of her in May's Penthouse.
Pet of the Month for February was Pamela Rhodes by John Copeland. This was his second shoot for
Penthouse, after the previous year's very explicit pictorial of Pet Amber Ramsay. Not quite so much open pussy in this one but he presented a sexy masturbation centrefold of Pamela. She was another Pet who disappeared as soon as she had appeared in the magazine.
This was not the case for Susan Waide.
Playboy often had catch up pictorials on its Playmates but, apart from Pet of the Year reviews this was the first time
Penthouse had gone back and re-photographed a previous Pet. Waide was now 24 and looking better than ever. She was the first
Penthouse centrefold who had clearly shown her labia and was obviously still happy to display herself four years later.
Lorie displays her tits...
...and her ass
Gallery had its "Girl next Door" competition and High Society had its...er, "Tits and Ass" contest. The winner of this proud title being Lorrie Ambrust. Yes, the very same Lorie Ambrust who had been in Hustler's amateur Beaver Hunt in January. You have to give her points for trying.
Monique Vandam was a Las Vegas croupier, except of course we would recognise those lovely eyes and that fleshy pussy anywhere. Yes, it is none other than
Penthouse Pet of the Month for May 1977 Valerie Rae Clark, one of the few Pets of the period that did any modelling in other magazines.
A girl who was even busier was the model they tried to persuade us was Camille from Barbados. Except. of course it is Ava Cadell from Hungary who was about to appear in erotic thriller The Golden Lady (1979) in the UK.
This issue of H
igh Society was certainly a good one for bottom lovers as all the girls thrust their behinds at the camera as if they were auditioning for, well,
Club. Here Lisa winks at us.
There was more anal displaying, as well as an open vagina, from Susan Bale from Tulsa.
Finally, High Society, which was supposed to be about real sex, ran a feature where readers could write in with their favourite fantasy and the magazine would shoot a pictorial to illustrate it. This month Hank from Minnesota had said that while watching the world championships for table tennis he imagined two women competitors ignoring the game as they got distracted by each other.
Not that difficult a one to arrange this but compared with the approach
Penthouse would have taken it is very lazy. Guccione would have had two pages of the girls engaged in actual ping pong before any of their clothes came off, not just lolling about in the vague vicinity of a table tennis table. Still, the set is redeemed by the presence of the ubiquitous Nancy Suiter and a quite remarkably assertive arsehole shot. Game, set and match to Miss S. Or whatever ping-pong people say.
March's
Playboy cover featured January 1978 Playmate Debra Jensen photographed by Phillip Dixon in a flamboyant up the skirt shot.
The first pictorial was a celebrity one of Bing Crosby's then unknown granddaughter Denise. She would later find fame as Lt Tasha Yar in
Star Trek: The Next Generation before becoming the first major
Star Trek character to get killed off.
Playmates were now being spared explicit legs apart poses unless there was a lot of shadow involved or, as with Miss March Denise McConnell, the picture was small. Denise was one of the 14 out of 3,500 women identified in the 25th anniversary Playmate hunt who made it to centrefold.
Playboy followed up their controversial December 1978 Cheerleaders pictorial with another set of shots of the now mainly sacked girls. Here is the unlikely named Bunny Hover, formerly of the New Orleans Saints cheerleaders, the Angels, barely concealed by some see-through knickers. All the fuss over the cheerleaders was a nice diversion from the issue of Playboy's proposed $135 million Atlantic City Casino, the construction of which began this month. The aim was that the Casino would take $1 million a day. The reality turned out to be rather different.
Moving away from the fashion models
Oui's cover girl was none other than
Penthouse Pet of the Month from April 1976, the gorgeous Sandy Bernadou, (here credited as Sandra) in a very racy catsuit for the cover of
Oui at that time. That year she had a large role in the early Andy Sidaris film
Seven (1979), from which we also saw a still of Carol Needham (
Playboy's Lee Ann Michelle, further up this post) in Hefner's magazine.
Sandy actually made the poster, alongside
Playboy Playmate Susan Lynn Kiger (January 1977). Unfortunately, unlike Sidaris' later Playmate packed films of the eighties and nineties
Seven is not available on DVD and Sandy's only other screen credit was a tiny part in the TV movie
The Million Dollar Face (1981). Sadly, Sandy (She actually spelled her first name Sande, but Bernadou was her real name) died in March 2011 at the age of 54, after a short illness.
After all the carefully covered or shadowed pussies of the past few months it is something of a surprise to encounter Kristin by S.Carter who is not obscured by anything.
Micki by Otto Weisser keeps her foot in the way. You do wonder what happened to the skin of all these girls with deep tans. No one bothered much with suntan cream in the seventies.
More 1977 style flashing from Francoise by Eric Muller.
Finally we have Sandy Bernadou and a couple of other young ladies going through a series of poses for a very lucky gentleman. Nothing very racy; it is all tasteful in a very French sort of way, although it was shot, like nearly all the couples pictorial in
Oui, in the US, by Phillip Dixon. There are strong echoes of Dixon's vampire pictorial for January's
Playboy in this.Gallery carried on in its increasingly non explicit way but did have this very effective shot of Lise Vanette in a hammock.
Pet of the Month Shasta Lindstrom posed in a very early-seventies way for Penthouse's March edition in John Copeland's second Pet of the Month in a row.
The first pictorial was a rather curious girl/girl cowgirl one by Antonin Kratochvil. It fetishised revolvers but had very little sexual heat. This was the best picture in an uninteresting pictorial.
There was no lack of heat in John Copeland shots of Shasta Lindstrom and her pretty little pussy. Perhaps her visibly engorged labia were just a little too prominent as the UK version of the pictorial left these pictures out. Indeed, in the UK version of her centrefold they airbrushed out her protruding bits which were so clearly visible in the US version (below)
John Copeland worked for Playboy, Penthouse and shot pictures for other magazines. He moved to Germany in the eighties to work for Playboy's German edition but hated the lack of spontaneity on Playboy shoots and left, marrying one of the makeup artists he had worked with there. He continues to work from his studios in Las Vegas.
The final pictorial for Penthouse's March edition featured a girl, Solana, with extreme tan lines which only served to highlight her spread pussy. In a way it gave a similar effect to the technique James Baes had been using in
Hustler, where a mirror was used to illuminate the girls' nether regions.
Hustler for March rather unusually featured a straight picture of their centrefold that month, albeit enthusiastically diddling herself. For the previous six months all the covers had sported couples as part of
Hustler's new image.
Part of this image was explained in the header to their monthly erotic films section.
"Millions of adults watch X-rated films every week yet the straight media have constantly avoided the obvious need to educate the public as to which films are rip-offs and which aren't." There, a public service and not an excuse to show Serena admiring Jamie Gillis' erection in
People (1978) in the magazine's strongest erotic films picture yet.
More writhing around in the first pictorial which showed stills from Sylvester Stallone's recently re-discovered soft core film. This, under the original title
Party at Kitty and Stud's was made in 1970 and Stallone, homeless at the time, was paid $100 for two days work. It was re-released as
The Italian Stallion to cash in on Stallone's
Rocky (1976). Despite subsequent claims, the film, as originally shot, was never a hardcore one
Their first model
for March Yvonne, photographed by Suze Randall, posed with a vibrator which was still an unusual prop for the time in magazine pictorials. The text claimed she was a a prostitute. This was in contrast to
Club who claimed nearly all their models were hookers.
It was Randall again for Hustler Honey Pandora, although how many of
Hustler's readers would have caught the classical allusion is doubtful. Randall, the queen of labia spreading, here, unusually, actually has her model indulging in some faux masturbation a la
Penthouse.
The final pictorial that month was a boy/girl one, except it was really boy/woman as the pictorial text discussed the issues of older women from the pre-sexually liberated age who have to hire gigolos to satisfy themselves. Or, at least, that was the excuse for the pictorial,
Male for Sale, but at least
Hustler was hiring an older female model.
More of note was the visibly aroused male model in the set. Hustler had been criticised for all the soft penises (except by those who wanted them out of the magazine altogether, of course). They had had a few "is it or isn't it?" pictures and several of their male models had been at least semi-erect but the man in this pictorial had definitely risen to the occasion.
Samples with another big-bust queen Sweden's Uschi Digard
The lady in question was none other than Candy Samples who had been appearing in adult films and magazines for almost a decade. When asked by appreciative readers,
Hustler said she was fifty years old but actually she was born in 1940 so she would have been 39 at this point. The grey wig doesn't really successfully turn her into an old person but it's the thought that counts and it is still good to see someone older than their teens or twenties on the pages of a men's magazine of the period.
Samples hadn't entered the glamour modelling circuit until the relatively late age of 28. She made some softcore films, such as Russ Meyer's
Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens, before drifting into hard core, particularly in the late seventies and eighties. She kept on making films and posing for magazines untill well into her fifties.
So that's it for the first quarter of 1979. April to June soon.
