Centrefold Venus of the Month 47: Sandy Bernadou, April 1976

We make no apologies for another mid-seventies Penthouse Pet as April's Centrefold of the Month.  Yes, we know it's not April but we have a considerable backlog.  Anyway, here is the lovely Sandy Bernadou from 1976.

Sandy didn't make the cover of the magazine, unusally, that was reserved for another of the models inside, Georgina Crown, photographed by Allan Neumann.

Sandy's shoot was photographed by Jeff Dunas and in the opening picture of her pictorial he has her in full-on boudoir mode, complete with typical Penthouse out of focus foreground flowers.

Sandy is only shown wearing a couple of different outfits in the pictorial.  The first one is this nice lacy camisole.  The hint of a smile enlivens Sandy's pictorial no end.

This close up shows us her remarkable green eyes; cleverly highlighted by the inclusion in the shot of...er, a a parrot. I think Sandy was the first Penthouse Pet to be depicted with a parrot.  Who's a pretty girl, then?

Maybe the parrot was chosen because it went with the dress that features in the next sequence of shots (or maybe the parrot was chosen because it went with the dress).  It's certainly a striking colour and is one of the things we remember about the pictorial, which we first saw at school. 

Sandy was 35-23-35 the text accompanying the pictorial told us.  It also told us that she was brought up in he Sierra Nevada mountains in California and was an outdoorsy girl who liked hiking and surfing.

For the time this was a remarkably assertive pussy touching picture and shooting it through the chair in the foreground frames her questing fingers beautifully.  

Here her dress has gone but she is still wearing her scarf as she feels herself up, in another typical Penthouse pose.

The final shots and her centrefold were some of the most explicit shots Penthouse had shown to date, in what was the height of the Pubuc Wars with Playboy.  Sandy's pussy shots were remarkable because they lacked the extreme soft-focus used in the previous Penthouse pictures.  Her extremely assertive centrefold picture was absolutely the most explicit they had published so far.  It's the challenge in her eyes which makes it look as if she is saying "I'm a beautiful girl, with a beautiful pussy and I don't care what you think!"

Sandy, unlike many Penthouse girls of the period, didn't disappear completely after her magazine appearance.  In March 1979 she appeared on the cover of Oui, shot by Playboy photographer Phillip Dixon.  Given the recent conservatism over covers in men's magazines in the US her nipple-flashing lace catsuit was quite daring for the time.

Sandy is the middle of the three women

Inside there was a pictorial, also by Dixon,  featuring a Frenchman and three women singers from a Parisian cafe.  Interestingly, in the pictorial it is one of the other girls who wears the lace catsuit that Sandy so fetchingly sports on the cover.

Sandy at left

 Sandy at left

 Sandy gets her bottom kissed

Sandy displays

Sandy interacts with the blonde

 Sandy at left

Sandy at rear

The pictorial in the magazine is hampered by rather too many small images but it is nice to see a Penthouse Pet appearing in another pictorial.  Too many of them posed once and were never seen in print again.

In her Penthouse feature she said that she was studying telecommunications at college but wanted to get into acting.  The only other sighting of Sandy we could find was from her appearance in the early Andy Sidaris film Seven (1979).  This was very much the prototype for a series of B movies which former sports film director Sidaris would make in the eighties and nineties.  They were low budget action films, often using Hawaiian locations, with their one redeeming feature being the fact that he employed a bevy of Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets to decorate them, offering a rare, pre-video, opportunity to see them in motion.    

Sandy plays waitress Rhonda in Seven

Seven (also known as Sevano's Seven) featured Playboy Playmates Susan Lynn Kiger (in quite a big role), Lee Ann Michelle (in reality Page 3 girl Carol Needham demonstrating all the acting talent of a speak your weight machine) and Sandy (quite a good actress, actually).

Sandy doesn't remain in her waitresses uniform for long and soon indulges in a bizarre scene where she strips off and gets into a silly string fight with Richard LePore whose character, the Professor, would return in another of Sidaris' cheap thrillers in the mid eighties.  Sandy, appearing here as Sandra, would have just one more film credit in the Tony Curtis starring TV movie Million Dollar Face in 1981 and then she would disappear from public gaze.  She was nineteen when her Penthouse pictorial appeared.

Sandy's real name was Sande, although Bernadou was her real last name, and  she hailed from Auburn in California where she was voted Miss Auburn in 1974.  She graduated from Placer High School in 1975 and shortly after that left to move to Los Angeles and her date with Penthouse.

Apparently she led a happy life after her brush with fame, which was certainly not always the case for centrefolds, but tragically died in March 2011 at the age of 54 after a brief illness.  Another lovely woman gone too early.

Credits from Seven (1979)

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