Our Beachcombing Cover Girl Jennie Wallace signals the sunny news that summer is, indeed, upon us—and previews the far-ranging pictorial and literary pleasures that are busting out all over in this June issue. Loaded with cameras and enthusiasm for their enviable assignment, lensmen Marvin Newman and Len kovars journeyed to the north of Europe to pay a pictorial tribute to the Nordic miss in a 12-page photo essay on the girls of Scandinavia. reporting from balmier climes, Travel Editor Len Deighton, in Hawaiian Aye!, counsels the tour-ophobic traveler to escape the sometimes madding hordes of Honolulu by exploring the less-frequented and scenically splendiferous out islands.
Playboy, June, 1968, Vol. 15, No. 6. Published monthly by HMH Publishing Co. Inc., Playboy Building, 919 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago. Illinois 60611. Subscriptions: In the U.S., its possessions, the Pan-American Union and Canada, $20 for three years, $15 for two years, $8 for one year. Elsewhere add $4.60 per year for foreign postage. Allow 30 days for new subscriptions and renewals. Change of Address: Send both old and new addresses to Playboy, Playboy Building, 919 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60611, and allow 30 days for change. Advertising: Howard W. Lederer, Advertising Director; Jules Kase, Associate Advertising Manager, 405 Park Ave., New York, New York 10022, MU 8-3030; Sherman Keats, Chicago Manager, 919 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60611, MI 2-1000. Detroit, Joseph Guenther, Manager, 2990 West Grand Boulevard, TR 5-7250; Los Angeles, Stanley L. Perkins, Manager, 8721 Beverly Boulevard, OL 2-8790; San Francisco, Robert E. Stephens, Manager, 110 Sutter Street, YU 2-7994; Southeastern Representative, Pirnie & Brown, 3108 Piedmont Rd., N.E., Atlanta, GA. 30305, 233-6729.
We had a visit the other day from a friend just back from a consulting job for a computer company that's working on the development of translating machines. This man isn't an electronics wizard, he's a professional, multilingual translator, who not only has done simultaneous translating for various Government agencies but enjoys a degree of distinction among the literati and cognoscenti as a sensitive translator of poetry. He said he had mixed feelings about his consulting stint—as though he had been hired to help dig his own occupational grave. But, he said, he felt pretty safe for the nonce, because the almost-human translating machines were really pretty badly hung up with puns, heteronyms (words spelled alike but different in sound and meaning), homonyms (words that mean different things but are pronounced alike) and those words that have different meanings when differently accented in speech, as, for example, the word "perfect," which, when stressed on the first syllable, is an adjective and, when stressed on the second syllable, is a verb.
Lawrence Durrell writes novels the way many tourists recount their travels—passing around snapshots, holding up souvenirs, describing quaint places and eccentric people. In Tunc (Dutton), a novel written in a style Proust might have adopted to parody the dictionary, Durrell moves from Athenian brothels to villas overlooking the Bosporus to Victorian castles in the English countryside, taking pains never to let an ordinary thought, likely event or lifelike character cross his hero's path. On the surface, the novel centers on the adventures of Felix Charlock, a "thinking weed," inventor of an ultimate computer, former lover of the world's most beautiful movie star and husband of the world's wealthiest woman. Not content to let well-off enough alone. Charlock undertakes a kind of regurgitation of things past. The second deck in this house of cards is a kind of Faust-Meets-the-Delphic-Oracle study of the relationship of freedom, memory and culture, with the hero becoming a kind of Charlock Holmesian metaphysical detective, asking whodunit of the universe. Durrell is a superb writer of offbeat bits of business (a mock oration atop the Acropolis, a falcon hunt in Turkey) and, like all his novels, this one is chock full of comic incidents, weird characters and aberrant insights. Yet in the end, he is the victim of his own ambitions. After teetering between profundity and absurdity, his plot takes a lurch into silliness. His insights trip over themselves, his style stutters, his language slops over the edges, his world-weary aphorisms become word weary and his merely eccentric characters all begin to look alike. His women, in particular, are not bewitching enigmas but bewildering fantasies, staring into fireplaces to indicate their tormented passions; and his love scenes, in their clinical mysticism, are a kind of Kama Suture. For all his talent, Durrell is essentially a Victorian traveler, displaying exotic stickers on an empty suitcase.
The mischief afoot in No Way to Treat a Lady is multiple murder improbably combined with Jewish-wry humor and incurable ham. Rod Steiger supplies the latter as he squeezes mordant fun from the fate of five women, each strangled and left sprawled upon a toilet with crimson lip prints daubed on her forehead. Rod dons a series of disguises from crime to crime, impersonating an Irish priest, a German plumber, a homosexual wig salesman and a transvestite hooker, along the way (and how else would murder be done by a theatrical impresario whose mother, a late great star, unhinged her darling with a mother's kisses?). In sum, Lady is an outrageous mishmash of sex, suspense, Momism, ethnic humor and boy-meets-girl waggery. Lee Remick, the girl giddily awaiting her turn as victim, passes the time in kookie tête-à-têtes with George Segal, as a beleaguered Jewish detective who has mother hang-ups of his own. Eileen Heckart plays George's momma more or less as a Hadassah lady with her Irish up. This is the sort of sloppy but enjoyable movie that boasts the virtue of being totally unexpected.
The flawless artistry of Carmen McRae becomes more apparent with each new recording for Atlantic, a label that has finally captured her soaring talent. Portrait of Carmen finds the vocalist with big-band backing and a quartet of top-flight arrangers. The tunes—from the opening I'm Always Drunk in San Francisco through the closing Wonder Why—are almost always attractively off the beaten track. Miss McRae's voice is supercharged with emotion and that intangible quality that separates the greats from the also-rans.
The ability to evoke honest laughter and then to twist it into absolute terror is a rare gift; and for that accomplishment alone, new playwright Israel Horovitz must be applauded. But in his one-act play, The Indian Wants the Bronx, the 28-year-old Horovitz has something else going for him: an ear for the beat (and the offbeat) of today, of young people and their jargon. His two street kids (Matthew Cowles and Al Pacino—the latter giving a marvelously eerie performance) loll about a New York street corner, jibe and jab, each trying to one-up the other, a game easily won by the tougher, more resilient Pacino. The object of their mutual attention and aggression is an East Indian, lost on his first day in New York, unable to speak a word of English and trusting blindly that the card he holds with his son's address in the Bronx on it will be his ticket to safety. To the two boys, he is at first a figure of fun, then an object of derision, then almost accidentally a cause for violence. The play is slightly padded; but throughout, the patois is perfect, the humor sharp, the menace truly threatening. On the other hand, the author's curtain raiser, It's Called the Sugar Plum, is a contrived little bill filler about an oddly matched pair of collegians. He has just run over and killed her fiancé. She comes to his apartment to accuse him, stays to fall for him, lingers to reveal their mutual callousness. It is not nearly as effective as The Indian, but it is spiced with hilarious Horovitz touches. The boy is putting himself through college by working at his uncle's meat market. "I load meat," he says humbly. "I adore meat," gushes the girl. It is, you might say, love at first meat. At the Astor Place, 434 Lafayette Street.
After four years of marriage, my husband is begging me to participate with him in a wife-swapping group. I am totally unwilling, because I strongly believe that we should have sex only with each other. He says he enjoys our sex life together but would like to have a little variety. Am I being selfish and oldfashioned in not wanting to go along with this?—Mrs. C. S., Colorado Springs, Colorado.
In an age of specialists, John Kenneth Galbraith defies categorization. As an economist and social theorist, he has been immensely influential in shaping the thinking of the current generation of Americans. As a witty and incisive writer, he has transformed the arcane and near-incomprehesible subject of economics into best sellers. As an on-and-off public official, he has advised Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. As U. S. Ambassador to India, he turned a relatively minor diplomatic mission into an important and exciting office, bringing a new awareness of American purpose to millions of Asians. And as a Harvard professor, Galbraith belies the stereotyped image of the retiring, ivory-tower academician. His home in Cambridge is a focal point for the jet set; he walks towering and self-assured in the world of powerful men and beautiful women; no first-rate party (such as Truman Capote's bal masqué a year or so ago) is complete without him; and he winters each year in the poshest of Swiss resort areas. By inclination, and by virtue of his position as head of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (which he helped found), he is intimately involved in the decidedly unprofessorial infighting of practical politics. And in the past few years, he has emerged as one of the most energetic, prolific, articulate and responsible critics of American policy in Vietnam (as evidenced by his forceful article "Resolving Our Vietnam Predicament," which appeared in these pages in December). Late last year, Galbraith finished "The New Industrial State," a best-selling view of American business that—like its precursor, "The Affluent Society"—is probably one of the most important books of its decade. In mid-April, he followed this with his first novel, "The Triumph," also destined for the best-seller lists. In fact, before this interview appears, Galbraith may find himself one of the few authors ever to occupy both the fiction and the nonfiction best-seller lists simultaneously.
"Would you have Dinner with me one night this week?" he asked the girl at a pause in the foaming, churning breakers of sound. It rose, it rose again, it fell, it rose, and then there was a pause.
From Malibu to Marblehead, fashion-right mermen are taking to the shore togged in the wildest swimgear to date. (The water sprites seen on these pages are Hollywood Deb Stars Suzie Kaye, Barbara Moore and Marianne Gordon.) To ensure that you'll be heading down to the sea in style, look for trunks in quick-dry fabrics; many of this year's selections are cut shorter and slimmer, to give the wearer maximum exposure to the sun and minimum resistance when swimming or water-skiing. For late-afternoon lounging, you'll want to switch to a pair of cotton linen-weave beach pants (floral prints for older flower children are in full bloom) and, depending on the temperature, don a beach top that's stylishly independent. The canned coordinate look has gone out with the tide. Choose from luxurious supershirts, Far East-influenced short caftans and colorful Italian cotton pullovers with high, contrasting neckbands. (Long sleeves, incidentally, are unanimously favored over short ones.) A thick cotton terry robe that reverses to a different pattern also will come in handy. This summer's seaside scene will be alive with bright colors, bold designs and exciting new swim duds. So dive right into the fashion swim of things.
"It's too thick to drink and too thin to Plow." The speaker was a tall, lean middle-aged man long identified with the University of Pennsylvania's crews who raced on the Schuylkill river in sculls. That day the water of the Schuylkill did, indeed, look like the viscous liquids of a cesspool as we peered at it from a Philadelphia bridge.
As soon as you enter June Playmate Britt Fredriksen's snug Palo Alto digs—a rented bungalow whose broad windows and hillside placement allow a glimpse of the southern tip of San Francisco Bay—you know that you're in the home of a special sort of California coed. Britt's concentrating on courses in English and interior decorating in her first year at Foothill College in nearby Los Altos Hills, while acquiring on-the-job training in a Palo Alto decorator's studio. As a result, English textbooks as well as out-sized art books and swatches of material are piled casually both in the sunny living room and in the comfy bedroom. A delightful naturalness characterizes Miss June's furnishings and helps pinpoint Norway as her country of origin: Wood, leather and woven fabrics predominate to create a motif that's more Nordic rustic than Scandinavian modern. "My home town—near Trondheim, about two thirds of the way down the coast—is bigger than a village," bright-blonde Britt says, "but it's isolated enough to have a country feeling. I'm sure I'd never be comfortable with anything made of plastic." The fresh fruits and vegetables in wooden bowls and the rows of colorful jars of preserves on the window sills in the kitchen are additional reminders of Miss June's rural memories.
During a wild party at a friend's country estate, the attractive city girl strolled outdoors for some air. Happening onto a grassy field, she lay down to watch the stars.
Cocktailing, of course, has long since outgrown the axiom that two peanuts make a party. True, the taste of a handful of potato chips may survive one or two deep sips of a double Scotch, but an appetite of any sizable dimensions won't be assuaged by going the onion-dip route. Substantial dishes such as casseroles of chicken and sausage, bowls of herbed rice, and Swedish sweet-and-sour brown beans with apple are much more closely attuned to contemporary cocktailing, which almost always finds the festivities extending beyond a reasonable dinner hour. The host who can astutely combine food and drink and thereby solve his guests' ever-present what-to-do-about-dinner dilemma is a thoughtful host, indeed. And thus is born the cocktail dinner, which stands between the tidbittery of olives wrapped with bacon and the full-fledged dinner, but closer to the latter in its ability to satisfy the inner man. Properly carried out, it provides all the glamor of a dinner without its elaborate layout. Even with the really massive cocktail party, where one has to break out the movable coat racks and folding chairs, a single hot dish such as a sumptuous chowder or a hot curry, served toward the end of the festivities, makes people feel that the affair's been something special.
"The logical climax of evolution can be said to have occurred," said the man in the white coat, "when, as is now imminent, a sentient species deliberately and directly assumes control of its own evolution."
Apparently there would be a party after all. It was already four days late and couldn't be called an initiation party, since all the pledges were now brothers. But that was really nobody's fault, unless it was Pomaczchek's. He had been a bit anxious, spending too many hours fussing in the attic over his 20-gallon barrel of home beer, until the fumes and fermentation got too much for his stomach to accept passively. Even then, it was simply a matter of poor judgment that everyone attributed to his lightheaded state. If he hadn't grabbed the edges of the barrel to steady himself or had turned his head away, they wouldn't have had to empty the whole mess out and start over again.
The Swedish flicka, the finnish tyttö, the Danish pige and the Norwegian pike have won reputations as being among the most desirable women on earth—for their incandescent sensuality, their feline grace and their all-embracing sexual independence. But can they be more than image? Hans Christian Andersen put it succinctly in one wry reference to his tales: "It is all," he wrote, "perfectly true." Despite cultural, economic and—to a lesser degree—ethnic differences among the four countries, the girls of Scandinavia remain the female embodiment of spiritual freedom and a compelling zest for life. The climate of their subcontinent can be harsh and forbidding; and, in this century at least, the region has been occasionally visited by the harsher realities of war. But through it all, the Scandinavian girl has never lost her warmth—or her femininity. The wellsprings of her unique spirit and the subtle variations it adopts in each of the four Scandinavian countries are well worth examining. For an in-depth guide to the Nordic girls' urban environs—replete with tips on customs, foods, hotels and hangouts—the reader contemplating a Scandinavian trip need look on farther than last month's Playboy's Guide to a Continental Holiday, by our well-traveled Travel Editor, Len Deighton, who covered both Stockholm and Copenhagen, as well as the highlights of the Swedish and Danish hinterlands, (text continued on page 134) in the first of his monthly travel features for Playboy.
A woman in a tweed pants suit came up to me at a party recently and asked, "What do you do?" I told her that I spent all my time writing magazine articles. "Man," she said, "you're really in a bag."
In sun and saddle all day long,To keep awake, I'll write a song.I know some ladies in the wrong;I'll tell you which:The ones who, when a man's in love,Act like a bitch.
The Cloying Insincerity of travel brochures in overromanticizing a land that needs no breathless clichés to espouse its merits has done terrible damage to the world's image of the Hawaiian Islands. The new arrival may be traumatized by having Honolulu served up as his first—and perhaps only—taste of Hawaii. Honolulu is a glittering neon and plastic town. Through it pass the busy transpacific air routes. Here's where the cruise ships dock and photographers snap bemused beleied tourists with hula-hip girls. Most tourists see no more than this real-estate man's ferroconcrete dream; and yet beyond it lies a group of tropical islands with surf-roaring beaches, lush valleys, oftfiery volcanoes, rain-forest villages and resorts as secluded as any in the Pacific.
In the past two years, a pair of parallel phenomena have bubbled up from the pop-cult underground into the mass media: the eyeboggling and oft-illegible art of psychedelic posters and an insistent brand of music known as acid rock. Both trends can be traced to a ramshackle section of San Francisco and to the superhip vision of Bill Graham, a bearishly saturnine chap who transformed a rundown, abandoned dance hall called the Fillmore Auditorium into a mind-bending total experience in sight and sound. A European refugee brought up in New York City, the 37-year-old entrepreneur became a citizen in 1949, fought in Korea, attended CCNY and ultimately landed in California, where his interest in theater led him to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Needing to raise money for this beleaguered repertory group, Graham began looking for somewhere to hold a benefit—and found the Fillmore. He then turned his efforts to creating a "package of environment" predicated on the theory of "giving the public not what they want but what I think they should want." Nightly S. R. O. crowds of young groovers prove that his didactic approach to the eclectic really works. It consists of immersing the audience in blinding strobes, flashing amoebalike images, purple fluorescence, slides projected on three walls—and then nearly drowning it in hyper-amplified rock. Graham books bands "not because they've sold 8,000,000 records but because they're good," and his taste has been vindicated by the nationwide success of such turned-on Fillmore graduates as the Jefferson Airplane (a group he piloted as manager for a while), The Doors and Big Brother and the Holding Company. To advertise his happenings, he began circulating art nouveau posters free; the subsequent overwhelming demand rapidly became a $35,000-a-week business—and turned him into the underground-poster king. His latest enterprise—New York's Fillmore East—recently opened to glowing reviews, but he says that's the last. Right now, Graham looks fondly toward theatrical producing. Meantime, he's the behind-the-scenes guru to an entire generation.
Emigrating from England to America in 1942, Charles Bluhdorn, then 16, began his business career as a $15-a-week cotton-brokerage clerk. By 1950, having mastered the intricacies of the commodities market (while attending both City College and Columbia University), he struck out on his own and promptly picked up his first million – mostly by importing coffee from Brazil. At 41, he is the kingpin of multitentacled Gulf & Western Industries—whose sales this year will come close to one and a quarter billion dollars—having parlayed his savvy into an empire of corporate conglomerates. How? Sample: Just 12 years ago, the Vienna-born merger magnate (business rivals call him "The Mad Austrian") purchased the failing Michigan Bumper Company, rejuvenated the firm and made it the nucleus of G. & W. Since then, Gulf & Western has acquired more than 64 corporations—among them, New Jersey Zinc, South Puerto Rico Sugar Company and Desilu Productions. Bluhdorn acquired Paramount Pictures in 1966 for $135,000,000 worth of G. & W. stock, upped film production by more than a third and convinced Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau to star in what promises to be Paramount's biggest winner of the year: The old Couple. Surrounded by a team of intelligent, irreverent Young Turks, Bluhdorn follows three criteria when acquiring a new company—which he does practically every six weeks: The firm must manufacture a successful product, must be easily convinced to sell and must need the cash, talent and drive he is willing to pour into a corporation to make it a giant in its field. Bluhdorn will soon have a gratifying edifice complex of his own to keep pace with G. & W.'s phenomenal growth: a 44-story Manhattan headquarters will be ready for occupancy in late 1969. For the foreseeable future, he intends to continue following his upbeat commercial credo. "What Gulf & Western has achieved has always been the result of feeling we could accomplish the impossible," he says. "Vacillation is the businessman's albatross; it's the people capable of making decisions and planning for the future who go forward in this world."
"Do you perhaps scatter your fire too widely? I mean, you really do attack almost every institution," a BBC interviewer once challenged inconoclastic film producer-director Peter Watkins. "Yes," came the unruffled response,"I am very undisciplined." At 32, Watkins can afford to be offhanded about his faults, for they are conspicuously outweighed by his talents, which have made him one of the youngest moviemakers ever to receive an Academy Award (for producing The War Game, a harrowing depiction of the agonies wreaked in what strategists call a "minimal" nuclear war). Undeniably, Watkins the polemicist sometimes whirls like a dervish in his desire to score direct satirical hits; but Watkins the artist remains in cool control of each detail: "Your eyes assure you that these frightful scenes could not have been faked." The Nation commented at the cunning artifice that made The War Game so gruesomely believable that the BBC, for which it was produced, refused to show it. But the resultant succès de scandale led to long-awaited critical and commercial success when Game was released as a movie. After entering show business as an assistant producer of TV commercials, Watkins financed his own experimental movies on the salary he earned. Of his first five films, two garnered awards—and an offer to produce documentaries for the BBC. This position gave him the budget and the opportunity to try some mad, Mod ideas, and one of his filmed specials, Culloden, was popular enough to qualify it for release to the art houses. When The War Game followed, the Rank Organization recognized Watkins' arrival as a big-league director and hooked him with a contract allowing an unprecedented degree of directorial freedom. The result, Privilege, was the kind of Wellesapoppin extravaganza that hasn't been seen since Orson was young and headstrong. Even the improbability of the story—a rock-'n'-roll singer who's converted into a new messiah—didn't prevent viewers from being overwhelmed by the same wizardry that made The War Game such an excruciating experience. Next for Watkins: a Western; predictably, it will take the side of the Indians.
"For a new order of priorities at home and abroad"—An urgent and impassioned plea for the Reassessment and Realignment of American commitments—by the outspoken chairman of the foreign relations committee, U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright