Football is an American passion and gambling is an American religion. During Super Bowl XVIII, bookies will pass the collection plates to a congregation of holy high rollers. According to some experts, as much as ten billion dollars will be wagered on that game. Peter Gent, former Dallas Cowboy and author of The Franchise and North Dallas Forty, suggested during a Sports interview conducted by John A. Walsh that every week, half of this nation of gamblers is renewed by the ritual of pro ball. That's what betting is: "God loves me. I'm going to cover the spread." A more chilling portrait of the effects of gambling is offered in The Self-Destruction of an All-American, by Art Schlichter with Dick Schaap. Schlichter had it all--he was a star at Ohio State, a quarterback for the Baltimore Colts. He was in the heat of the action, but his quest for more cost him almost $1,000,000 in gambling debts. The accompanying art, by Teresa Fasolino, gives you a seat on the 50-yard line. A lighter side of pro football is presented in The Dancing Bears, in which Contributing Editor Asa Baber, the author of our regular Men column, speculates on what would happen if the Chicago Bears hired a ballerina as coach. Imagine kickoffs to Bartók, blocks and tackles and passes to Bizet and Bach and Mozart, all the way to the Super Bowl.
Playboy, (ISSN 0032-1478), February, 1984, Volume 31, Number 2. Published Monthly by Playboy, Playboy Bldg. 919 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611. Subscriptions: In the United States and its possessions, $54 for 36 issues, $38 for 24 issues, $22 for 12 issues. Canada, $27 for 12 issues. Elsewhere, $35 for 12 issues. Allow 45 days for new subscriptions and renewals. Change of address: Send both old and new addresses to Playboy, Post Office Box 2420, Boulder, Colorado 80302, and allow 45 days for change. Marketing: Walter Joyce. Divisional Promotion Director; Ed Condon, Director/Direct Marketing; Jack Bernstein, Circulation Promotion Director. Advertising: Charles M. Stentiford, Advertising Director; Harold Duchin, National Sales Manager; Michael Druckman, New York Sales Manager; Milt Kaplan, Fashion Advertising Manager, 747 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10017; Chicago 60611, Russ Weller, Associate Advertising Manager, 919 North Michigan Avenue; Troy, Michigan 48084, Jess Ballew, Manager, 3001 W. Big Beaver Road; Los Angeles 90010, Stanley L. Perkins, Manager, 4311 Wilshire Boulevard; San Francisco 94104, Tom Jones, Manager, 417 Montgomery Street.
Storing as much information as possible in the smallest available space has always been one of man's preoccupations. The ancients--those born before the floppy disk--had to make do with the aphorism, an eternal truth packed into a one-liner so pithy even a son-in-law could remember it. Not only were aphorisms memorable, they were infinitely flexible; no matter which side of an argument one was on, one could always find a bit of wisdom with which to cover one's posterior, an aphorism to battle an aphorism. We asked Lenny Kleinfeld for examples.
After five bruising years catching passes for the Dallas Cowboys, Peter Gent wrote "North Dallas Forty," a novel about the underside of pro football that knocked the N.F.L. for a loop, John A. Walsh recently caught up with Gent, who once again has stirred up the football world with "The Franchise," a novel about corruption and gambling in the professional game.
Life gets Better: Graham Parker gets good ink. Ever since his debut with the Rumour, back in the pop Sahara of the mid-Seventies, Parker's records have gotten the kind of surgical analysis that screams from music pages everywhere, "Keep slugging, bucko; we're out here listening." Nice rubs of attention, sure, but hardly important. Critics are the grace notes in a musician's career. They love and hate on paper and get their records free.
Maybe it's just coincidence, but two new Warner albums--Slow Burn, by T. G Sheppard, and Cage the Songbird, by Crystal Gayle--appear to respect the tendency of some country music to evolve naturally from highly structured honky-tonk to a more contemporary sound that doesn't try to compete with rock. That is fine: As long as the lyrics are a bit naïve, the appeal unsophisticated and the sentiments a little maudlin, C&W can retain its identity despite different styles. These albums have a similar mellow quality that makes for nice travelin' music, as in the old car stereo.
Prince and the Showgirl: An open audition for Prince's love interest in his upcoming film, Purple Rain, was held in New York. According to the casting director, they are looking for a voluptuous brunette between 18 and 21, 5'4" or under, with "an open, ripe look." We figure there must be thousands of young women who fit that description. If they aren't able to find her in New York, they'll look in L.A. We don't know how to tell them, but there are no brunettes in L.A.
Writing humor has long been recognized as the riskiest literary shot you can take, because, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, any damn fool can rear up with no more credentials than a birth certificate and announce, "I don't think that's funny." And what's true for the writer is also true for the editor who decides to collect short humorous pieces into an anthology such as The Best of Modern Humor (Knopf)--in this case, Mordecai Richler. Forced to rate the funny vs. the stupid among these selections (get out your birth certificates), we'd call it about 50-50. There are more than 60 writers here trying to amuse you, so the odds are good somebody will make you laugh. Dorothy Parker's missing, because, as Richler tells us in his introduction, he just doesn't think she's funny anymore. At least she saw it coming.
Too Bad the producers of Gorky Park (Orion) were not permitted to shoot Martin Cruz Smith's exhilarating best seller in Moscow. As a substitute, Helsinki in winter serves very well, and the novel is well served on all counts in Dennis Potter's brisk adaptation, directed by Michael Apted with cinematographer Ralf Bode as his inventive collaborator (the two also did fine work together on Coal Miner's Daughter). While anyone who has read the book may be slower to take the hook than I was, I am working my way up to telling you this is one hell of a movie--the sharpest, most provocative edge-of-your-seat thriller in the past decade or so. Audiences nowadays seem to snub films with a strong political slant, so let's set the record straight on Gorky Park--it's a whodunit about three grisly murders, with more to follow. It takes place in a heady milieu of international intrigue and danger, crawling with K.G.B. men, would-be defectors, traitors, con men and more than one ruthless killer. But the plot finally has more to do with contraband than with politics.
Idol Gossip: Mel Gibson, Sissy Spacek and Scott (The Right Stuff) Glenn have been set to star in Universal's The River, a sort of contemporary Grapes of Wrath about a corn-belt farm family's struggle for survival against economic obstacles and the elements. Word has it that several well-known actors (including Harrison Ford) wanted the Gibson role, but the Aussie actor was chosen by director Mark Rydell after demonstrating his ability to speak with an American accent (not surprising, since Gibson was born in Upstate New York and didn't move to Australia until he was 12). The River, which is being shot in Tennessee, is Gibson's first American film.... Speaking of Australians, down-under director Peter Weir has been signed to helm Warner Bros.' adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast. Scripted by Paul Schrader, the flick involves a New England man who abandons modern American society and relocates his family in the tropics.... French film maker Claude Lelouch will make a sequel to the 1966 classic A Man and a Woman. Set to start shooting in 1985, it will be titled Twenty Years After. ... George Segal and Morgan Fairchild co-star in CBS' spoof The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood, a send-up of the Errol Flynn classic.... Paramount is planning a sequel to Flashdance, but Jennifer Beals won't be starring in it. She has decided to continue her studies at Yale rather than reprise the role.... "Break dancing," "rapping," "electric boogie" and "sci-fi street sounds" will highlight Orion's Beat Street, a musical scripted by The Village Voice writer Steve Hager, who has been keeping track of the street-dance phenomenon since it began.... Gary Busey has been signed to play the lead in The Bear, a biopic about the late Paul "Bear" Bryant. Busey will portray the University of Alabama football coach from 18 to his death at 69.
Fubar is one of my best buddies, but he never gets the word. I try to help him. Ruth, his ex-wife, tries to help him. Even his kids try to help him. But Fubar just doesn't understand the times. For a man of 35, he's retarded. No wonder he never gets laid. He worries too much, and he doesn't know how to deal with women.
Women are always complaining that intercourse does not give the clitoris enough stimulation. They insist that men use their fingers to masturbate it. Why hasn't anyone suggested the obvious--that instead of inserting the penis, the man use it to stimulate the clitoris directly, holding it in his hand? What do you think?--R. F., Cambridge, Massachusetts.
As we read our Dear Playmates mail, we find that certain subjects come up on a regular basis. One of them is men and housework. So we asked the Playmates to give us their views.
In a New York case titled In Re Alice D., a judge of the small-claims court decided just what is appropriate to say and do when your lover becomes pregnant; and, perhaps even more important, he also set down, for possibly the first time, the standards, warranties and legal etiquette required of today's consenting adults.
Among pop-music stars, it isn't often that the crowd pleasers also manage to elicit praise from the critics. It is even rarer to find a singer-songwriter who was at the center of the Sixties' cultural explosion--indeed, who was a musical influence in that culture--creating new and original music in the Eighties. By these criteria alone, Paul Simon may be one of the most successful composers and performers in the history of pop music.
Geoff Huston stood on the foul line with one second to play. He had two foul shots coming, and his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, was losing by six points. The Cavaliers, one of the worst teams in pro basketball, were the underdogs by five and a half points. I had bet on the Cleveland Cavaliers. That tells you something about how sick I was.
Carol wayne is setting up an appointment on the phone. "When do you want to see me?" she asks. How about Thursday? comes the reply. "Thursday," she muses. "How do you spell that?" Who can blame the person on the other end of the line for wondering whether or not he's the victim of a put-on? But that's the effect--calculated or not--that Carol Wayne seems to have. She parlayed her ample physical attributes, her high-pitched, cartoon-character voice and a talent for dizzy logic and double-entendres into 101 appearances on The Tonight Show, usually as the unsuspecting Matinee Lady to Johnny Carson's lecherous Art Fern, host of the "Tea Time Movie." Later in the show, when she joined the rest of the guests, the real Carol--such as she (text continued on page 160)101 Nights with Johnny(continued from page 56) is--would surface.
My coffee's gone cold and I look at her over the rim of my cup. I look at her throat, at the tiny part that moves as she talks. I listen to her life and I know when to nod my head and when to smile. But my stomach tightens as I try and look like I know what she's sayin'. I see her naked, her belly against mine. And I think how she was probably still intact my first year down.
Come February, many Playboy Clubs across the country will be saluting American wines with a month-long California Wine Festival. The event is both fitting and timely. It's barely half a century since the domestic wine industry was born again, starting from scratch, after the great Prohibition drought. Now, 50 years after repeal, wines are being produced commercially in 40 states, including such improbable ones as Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Idaho and Virginia. But the fact remains that California, which accounts for more than 90 percent of home-grown ferments, is what American wine is all about. It also happens that the golden anniversary of repeal is a most opportune time to start a wine cellar from the Golden State--or to augment an existing cache. The five decades of experience, new plantings and frenzied experimentation by vintners and growers are now paying off--with (continued on page 150)Beautiful Wines(continued from page 65) interest. Eavesdrop on a conclave of California wine professionals and you'll hear a lot about microclimates, clonal selections, budding over and drip irrigation. All of that trade jargon points up one supremely significant fact: West Coast vintners finally have a handle on matching particular soils, climates, grape varieties and viticultural practices for optimum results--a process that evolved over centuries in Europe. American wine makers today are also working with nobler grapes--more Cabernet, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Merlot and fewer of the mediocre Burger, Chasselas and Thompson seedless. And the grapes themselves are more opulent, due to meticulous cloning--which sounds like something out of an s-f flick but simply means cultivating the most desirable strain of a particular grape. The cumulative effect of these advances, plus innovative technology, has led to a new California wine style.
Thirty years of covers represent in a small way the chapter headings of our history, how we became who we are. It started out well, of course. Marilyn Monroe was our cover girl on that first undated issue of late 1953. The Rabbit followed quickly--premiering in the second issue, in fact. Hef conceived of the Rabbit as a means of personalizing Playboy. He avoided a human symbol--partly because of Esquire's Esky and The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley. Instead, he chose a formally attired Rabbit as an image of sophisticated sex that was, at the same time, self-satirical. When Art Director Art Paul drew the Rabbit emblem, it didn't occur to him that he was designing what was to become the second-most-recognized symbol in the world (the first is the Coca-Cola logo). "I probably spent all of half an hour on it," Paul remembers. But by 1959, a letter mailed from New York with only the Rabbit Head emblem on the envelope was promptly delivered to Playboy in Chicago. Since then, the Rabbit Head has figured in some way in the design of every Playboy cover--whether as an obvious design feature or a subtle configuration of a telephone cord or a strategic wrinkle in a bed sheet. We even contorted Playmate Donna Michelle into a human Rabbit Head. Although Playboy's covers maintain a certain consistency of attitude, our graphic and pictorial styles mirror the cultural weather around us. As you look at the covers on these pages--and the pictures that describe what went on during some of the shootings--you'll notice, we think, what we have all survived: the sexual silliness of the Fifties, the several liberations of the Sixties, the giddy glamor and self-absorption of the Seventies and the more engaging challenges of the early Eighties. Remember with us, then, 30 years of sights for sore eyes, always the best reason to visit a newsstand.
Some guys have all the luck. Last summer, Rob Lowe co-starred with Jacqueline Bis-set in Class, and next month, he's coming back to the big screen with Nastassia Kinski and Jodie Foster in The Hotel New Hampshire. As if that weren't enough of a good thing, on these pages we've teamed him with some more terrific-looking ladies to model the backbone of one's sportswear wardrobe--sweaters. The trend in pullovers--as in tailored clothes--is away from body hugging to a looser fit. Solid colors have faded to patterns, and traditional V- and crew-neck styles are supplemented with U- and boat-neck shapes. Alan Flusser's classic Argyle sweater vest has the conservative vote; for a tougher, more trendy look, try tucking your sweater into your pants, as Lowe has done here with a Daniel Caron black-and-red-cashmere V-neck and a pair of black-leather slacks. What was Lowe's favorite sweater in this feature? Being the clever, diplomatic lad that he is, he claimed to like them all. But we did notice that he seemed inordinately fond of Alexander Julian's "doodle" sweater, pictured on page 75. Or maybe it was just the tiger of a lady on his broad shoulders. Only Rob Lowe knows for sure.
Who is the entrepreneur? What molds him and what motivates him? How does he differ from the nine-to-fiver, and where are those differences most telling? Why will one brother set out to build a business while another aspires to promotions and perks? Why does one stay up nights working on a business plan while the other brags about his pension plan? Is it brains? Luck? Hard work? Something else?
A year ago, Californian Justine Greiner underwent the kind of trauma only another Californian could understand: She went to Kansas. Her plan was to attend the University of Kansas in Lawrence. What she experienced there shook her to the core of her 5'9" frame. There were no palm trees. There was no ocean. The sun, when it dared to come out, shone down on some peculiar white stuff that covered the ground for acres around. Mars, they tell us, has more forbidding terrain, but the Kansas wheat fields were enough for Justine. At the end of her first term, she tucked her skate board under her arm and flew back West. By the time the first summer rays were hitting the Santa Monica beaches, a happy Justine wasn't in Kansas anymore.
During a morning coffee break, the would-be office Don Juan sauntered over to the new receptionist and remarked, "It has to be prophetic, baby. I had a dream about you last night. What I dreamed was that you were an automobile motor."
That first morning at training camp was worse than Parris Island. We got no water, no salt pills, no breaks. Red Emerson stood up in the tower and yelled at us through the bullhorn like we was slaves building pyramids: "You fat bastards, nobody's in shape. I want another mile in full gear right now"--stuff like that.
The star turn of the Winter Olympics is Alpine skiing. Not everyone agrees with that, of course. The bobsledders and the luge nuts are partial to their own ways of traveling over ice and snow, as are the jumpers and the cross-country boys. The figure skaters live in a world of their own composed in equal parts of sport and dance, and the hockey fans are still caught up in that once-in-a-lifetime euphoria of the miracle at Lake Placid. But to most Americans, the thrill of the Olympics is the sight of young men and women skimming down mountains at breath-taking speeds on skis. That's Alpine skiing, and there are three ways that you can do it. You can race down at 80 miles an hour tucked low with your chin out over your knees, going balls out for speed in what has been described as a series of recoveries from impending disaster, pounding and pushing for the finish line below. You do it that way and they call it downhill racing. Or you can go down weaving through a complex series of gates at a much slower pace, a tightrope walker on snow and ice, a balletmaster dancing on knives, a measure of grace plus speed as you shift your edges with an exquisite precision that takes you once again to the banner at the finish line below. You do it that way and they call it a slalom. You can do it either of those ways, or you can combine the two and go down the mountain at almost the speed of the downhill, maneuvering gates with almost the precision of the slalom in an exhausting hybrid called G.S.--giant slalom--and that's Alpine skiing, too. It's all Alpine skiing when you go up on the mountain and then you ski down.
Ok, you survived the first wave. After that initial hesitation, you plunged right in and proved that you could eat all the raw fish those little guys behind the counter could dish out. Like John Wayne leading an assault on Guadalcanal, you rallied those in your crowd who were faint of heart: Squid? Watch this. Sea urchin? No sweat. Your girlfriend was very, very impressed.
In the third round of a fight for the Women's Bantamweight Boxing Championship of the World, Graciela Casillas--lean, compact, her dark eyes spitting fire--caught Debra Wright with a right cross to the jaw. Wright went down hard, her head bobbing on the sweaty canvas in the Tucson Auto Auction Building.
Robert Crane had lunch with the effervescent Shelley Long at Michael's in Los Angeles. He reports, "Shelley is so cute, so sweet that I figured it must be a façade, that there was a dark side to her waiting to get out. Her collegiate good looks and enthusiasm about everything make me long for the Fifties--when lunch was a lot cheaper."
"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" Lady Macbeth used to shout on the day she cleaned the sheets. There was no Wisk in the Middle Ages. Today, detergents can take care of even the most difficult wet spots with no wringing of hands, but sex is just as much in evidence as ever. Of course, there are always reactionaries trying to repress it. The ones who try hardest, however, often seem to have the very reactions they scream about most (viz., Springfield, Ohio's, city manager Thomas Bay--the man who in 1982 suspended policewoman Barbara Schantz for posing for Playboy--who this past October had to resign his job after having been picked up for allegedly soliciting a prostitute. And Representative Dan Crane, who had portrayed himself in three successful Congressional campaigns as an ultraconservative Christian family man, was censured by the House for making it with a teenaged page). In 1983, one kind of repression even had a hand in spawning a new forum for libidinous art. Music videos, which everyone should know about by now, began as intra-industry promos for musical groups; some acts, most notably Britain's Duran Duran, first attracted U.S. attention through video rather than records or live performances. MTV picked up those tuneful ads and ran with them--24 hours a day. That's the good news. The bad news is that MTV moguls still make a habit of clipping out the most fun, most revealing--we may as well come right out and say it--most arousing parts of the tapes they beam to Anytown. That practice led to a new cable show on our own Playboy Channel, Hot Rocks, which earns its name each week with videos that are too hot for MTV's wires. We'll show you a few of those cuts here, as well as a lot of other frolic from 1983. Enough preface, though. "One, two--why, then 't is time to do 't," said Macbeth's lady once, disdaining extended foreplay. "You mar all with this starting."
The good news about the current culinary market place is that it's a chef's surprise of innovative products--such as Farberware's Electronic Ultra Chef-- that are designed to whisk you out of the hot-stove league and into the living room with your guests. (The Farberware unit, incidentally, can cook the fixings for a large sit-down dinner or just supper for one while you're researching the perfect martini.) When you do end up slaving over a hot microwave oven, make it Kenmore's latest model, which incorporates a five-inch color-TV set and a stereo cassette player in its sleek black cabinet And for the moanin' after, Krups's digital wall-mounted coffee maker can be preprogrammed to brew java into a carafe. The bad news? Somebody still has to do the dishes.
Tour the men's cosmetics section in your favorite department store or pharmacy and you'll find enough muscle soaks, shower gels and body lotions to keep a caliph fit and clean for 1001 nights. Body grooming is the name of this new skin game, and manufacturers are playing by a different set of rules from those in effect years ago, when one merely slapped on a deodorant and a body splash and went out to conquer the world. Such new products as Aramis' Foot Massage Cream and Chanel for Men's hand cream are not pleasant-smelling placebos; the Foot Massage Cream, for example, contains lactic-acid salt, which helps relieve dry, cracked skin, and the hand cream also makes an ideal cold-weather moisturizer for elbows, feet and knees. Since one can be a lonely number when it's just you and a fresh can of Aramis' Muscle Soothing Soak or Paco Rabanne's body lotion, we recommend that you do your serious torso grooming with another body--preferably of the opposite sex. That idea rubs us the right way.