A January issue of Playboy is always big. This one's smart, too. You'll discern the sweet reason of William F. Buckley, Jr., in Redefining Smart, a Nautilus program for the mind. Sagely illustrated by Robert Giusti, Buckley's think piece suggests that the age of the Renaissance man is over but the eternal verities remain. Among them are equal justice under law, baseball and changing American sexuality, examined this month in Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood, by another great thinker, James Baldwin.
Playboy, (ISSN 0032-1478), January, 1985, volume 32, Number 1. Published Monthly by Playboy, Playboy building, 919 North michigan avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611. Subscriptions: in the United States and its possessions, $54 for 36 issues, $36 for 24 issues, $22 for 12 issues. Canada $27 for 12 issues. Elsewhere, $35 for 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 80322, and allow 45 days fir change. Marketing: Ed condon, director/direct marketing: Jack Bernstein, circulation promotion director. Advertising: charles M. Stentiford, advertising director: jeffrey kleinman, craig vander ploeg, senior associate managers: Jay Remer, National alcoholic beverages manager, 747 third avenue, New York, New York 10017; Russ Weller, Midwest advertising manager 919 North Michigan avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611; 3001 West Big Beaver road, Troy Michigan 48084; Los Angeles 90010, Stanley L. Perkins, Manager, 4311 Wilshire boulevard; San Francisco 94104, Tom Jones, manager, 417 Montgomery street.
'Tis the season again for us to recommend books that will make terrific gifts to give--and get. As usual, our friends at Harry N. Abrams have some wonderful coffee-table books. Among them: Baseball, with photographs by Walter Iooss, Jr., and text by Roger Angell; That's Dancing, by Tony Thomas, the companion volume to the film; and Automobile and Culture, which traces the image of the auto in art by Gerald Silk, Angelo Tito Anselmi, Strother MacMinn and Harry Flood Robert, Jr., with original photography by Henry Wolf.
I sleep better at night knowing that Slingin' Sam Baugh, Tom Harmon, Doak Walker and all ofmy other gridiron heroes of yesteryear never had to wear one of those perforated, mesh fish-net see-through football jerseys. You know the kind. It's the jersey, much in vogue now, through which you can see a player's pads, tape, tattoo, birthmark--everything but his school colors. The jerseys were around this season like recruiting violations, but as far as I'm concerned, they're worse. They make teams look stupid. I stopped counting Doug Flutie's touchdown passes for Boston College back in October, because I got tired of seeing a rib cage where a jersey ought to be. I wondered what a kid would say to the BC quarterback if he went up to him for an autograph: "Hi, Doug. Nice chest hair"--something like that?
First, the bad news: Maybe he's just been too busy with his film career, but David Bowie bothered to write only three new tunes for Tonight (EMI). The rest is pretty much filler: retreads of old Iggy Pop collaborations and a couple of cover tunes. God only knows what to make of Bowie's grotesquely camp reading of the Beach Boys' God Only Knows, and why is Tina Turner mixed so low on the title cut? Bitch, bitch, bitch. And the good news? Two of the new ones, Blue Jean and Dancing with the Big Boys, have all the verve and kick of last year's Let's Dance--and fortunately for the budget-conscious, they both appear on Bowie's current single.
We've thought it over and have decided that compact discs are a good idea--mainly because they're indestructible and take up little space without sacrificing complete liner notes. Also, they sound pretty good--no noise. Here are our current favorites.
Rock 'N' Roll and Mistletoe: Are you wondering what to get your music lover for a gift? We've done the research for you, so grab this list, hum a few fa-la-las and head for the stores.
Christmas Comes to L.A. at roughly the same time as a global catastrophe in Night of the Comet (Atlantic), writer-director Thom Eberhardt's irreverent s-f comedy. Two teenaged sisters (played with irrepressible zest by Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) are among a handful of Californians who escape instant annihilation--after which Comet proceeds as if to ponder how a couple of fun-loving Valley girls might face the end of the world. Well, they go shopping, for one thing, wrongly presuming that the stores will be unattended. They check out a local radio station, lest the pop music stop, and there they encounter a handsome truck driver named Hector (Robert Beltran, who had the tasty title role in Eating Raoul). They also fend off rapacious zombies and a bloodsucking, scientific SWAT team that aims to sap their plasma to create a serum for survival. It's one of the movie's sprightliest conceits that the comely siblings, one a cheerleader, have also been trained to handle deadly weapons by their absentee father, who's "down in Honduras with the goddamned Green Berets." Sounds crazy, right? Right. But Comet is fresh and suspenseful, too, with impudent teenage dialog that rings amusingly true from start to finish. Plainly a film maker of promise, Eberhardt appears to be thumbing his nose at Spielberg and Lucas by cutting their apocalyptic fantasies down to size for a latter-day Tammy and Gidget. [rating]3 bunnies[/rating]
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai S-f filmflam. Peter Weller is Buckaroo, but John Lithgow's mad mad scientist steals the show. [rating]2 bunnies[/rating]
Idol Gossip: Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo will team up in MGM/UA's Wise Guys, a $9,000,000 adventure comedy about a pair of minor gangsters who, unbeknown to each other, must bump each other off as punishment for mistakenly stealing from the Mob. It's to be directed by Robert(Oxford Blues)Boris.... Jacqueline Bisset and Christopher Reeve are the unlikely duo set to top-line CBS' three-hour movie Anna Karenina. (Trivia buffs will recall that Greta Garbo and Fredric March starred in MGM's 1935 original.) ... The movie version of Eleni,Nicholas Gage's gripping account of the Greek civil war's tragic effect on his home town and family, has begun filming in Greece, Spain and London. Director Peter Yates and screenwriter/playwright Steve Tesich (both of Breaking Away fame) have teamed up to make Eleni, along with a cast that thus far includes Kate Nelligan, John Malkovich and Linda Hunt.... Rodney Dangerfield returns to the big screen in Orion's Back to School, a comedy about an older guy who--you guessed it--goes back to college to see what he missed.
"You've Got To fight Swanson," the coach said. He was a short, tough Chicago Pole who had been a pro boxer himself. "You guys are two of the best in your weight class."
"What About a life in the mountains?" I ask myself sometimes. It used to be a strong fantasy of mine, when all my goddamn city doings got to be like juggling knives and eating fire. When the muscles between my shoulder blades felt like barrelmakers had tightened them. When I'd get up into the airless little room that is my brain so completely that it felt like I was never going to get out, that I was just going to die up there, like some rat in an attic. Then I'd think about making a stand somewhere I could let the animal run, make him work for supper, then let him go to sleep breathing pine and looking at the stars. These days, though, I know I was kidding myself about having what it takes to live that far out on the lonely edge of things. I might have had some of the obvious things it takes--the physical equipment, maybe--but I don't think I ever could have cultivated the invisible muscle, the emotional grit it takes to become really at home in the wilderness.
My partner sometimes worries aloud that we make love too frequently. We have been together for nine years and previously had been friends, keeping in intermittent to close touch (sans carnal knowledge) for five years before beginning our long, intimate and continuing, relationship. During this time--seven years cohabitating and two married--we have made love an average of 520 times per year. We both have kept journals since undergraduate days, including this and other data of personal interest. The figures would be even higher, except that our careers keep us separated from two weeks to two months a year.
Since the holiday season is a time when everyone has fantasies, we thought it would be appropriate to ask our Playmate advisors about theirs. After all, not every goody has to come wrapped up under the tree.
Goldie Hawn is sitting at a table on the patio of The Frying Pan in Basalt, 20 miles from Aspen, talking with a friend about how much she likes living in Old Snowmass, where nobody bothers her or her kids.
This year, we subscribed to cable television, mostly because when cable television comes around, subscribe to it is one of the things with-it households do, even as, 50 years ago, they would have subscribed eventually to larger encyclopedias, larger dictionaries; bought more magazines.
You Don't Need to go buck to the stones' Get Yet Ya-Ya's Out! to know that rock 'n' roll has a lot to do with sex. A short list of typical titles: Push, Push in the Bush, Hung Upside Down, Mama Told Me Not Lo Come, Then Came You, Easy Comin Out (Hard Coin' In), It's Your Thing, My Ding-a-Ling, Why Don't We Do It in the Road?, and, only for the lonely, Beat It, Whip It and You'll Never Get Cheated by Your Hand. A fast textual analysis reveals that rock 'n' roll's most popular word is baby, followed by kiss, my, ya-ya, yeah, yeah and yeah. Remember the Crickets, Buddy Holly's band? Waylon Jennings, who chirruped with them for a while, confirmed every parent's greatest fear when he said, "Rock 'n' roll meant fucking, originally. Which I don't think is a bad idea." (Better put that man in the Playboy Hall of Fame.) All of that was fine for Waylon and Willie and the boys, but the girls never seemed to get much of the action. There were feminine rockers even before Michael and the Boy. You had Little Eva, Diana Ross, Aretha, Tina and millions of -ellas and -ettes. Even Raisinettes, but they went stale in a hurry. On the kick-ass side, you had Grace Slick and Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde. Linda Ronstadt actually won more platinum records than Elvis and The Who put together, but it was still a man's, man's world. Heavy-metallurgists, in particular, had an ornery attitude-- if she can't suck the strings off a slide guitar, what's she doing backstage? But the times, as somebody said, a-change. Now there are more girls in the guiltarati than ever before, and a few, inspired by pyromania or Jennifer Beals, are getting into heavy metal. All the women you'll find here have the two things rockers need, soul and sex appeal. We'll be focusing on the latter as personified by New Wave and old. Apollonia and Vanity. Stevie, Grace, Tina and even a few who aren't famous--yet. Consider it an attempt to fulfill a few rock-'n'-roll fantasies, in the spirit of rock's original meaning.
On July 31, 1964, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was sleeping late after writing all night when I heard my wife, Sally, scream above the yammering of children's voices. I didn't know what was wrong, but whatever it was, I knew instantly that it was bad. I sprinted down the hallway, and before I ever reached the front door, I had made out what the children, all talkingat once, were trying to say.
It is dark in Rick's apartment. Black-leader dark, heavy and abstract, silent but for a faint hoarse crackle like a voiceless plaint and brief as sleep. Then Rick opens the door and the light from the hall scissors in like a bellboy to open up space, deposit surfaces (there is a figure in the room), harbinger event (it is Ilsa). Rick follows, too preoccupied to notice: His café is closed, people have been shot, he has troubles. But then, with a stroke, he lights a small lamp (such a glow! The shadows retreat, everything retreats: Where are the walls?), and there she is, facing him, holding open the drapery at the far window like the front of a nightgown, the light flickering upon her white but determined face like static. Rick pauses for a moment in astonishment. Ilsa lets the drapery and its implications drop, takes a step forward into the strangely fretted light, her eyes searching his.
Today's best designers know that clothes don't make the man, they reveal him. Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Willi Smith and Perry Ellis--the men who make the clothes--think spring 1985 will be a season of casual elegance, best exemplified by what Armani calls "clean lines and comfortable dressing." The outfits previewed reflect each designer's brand of haute haberdashery. Expect other designers to follow suit as the new season unfolds, but don't count on seeing anything to surpass the gentility on display here.
I Have a Friend here in Mississippi, a flamboyant and intrepid soul in his early 30s, who was recently devastated because his girl and his dog ran away in the same week--separately and, we surmise, from different motives. Their names were Christie and Augie. "I loved them both!" he cried out in a grievous agony that began with the twin disappearances last spring and continued into the summer. "The same damned week--and the guilt I have to wrestle with over missing my dog more!" My friend has taken to his heart the words from Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows: "It's lonesome you'll be this night and tomorrow night and long nights after." He wanders now barefooted in the perfumed and spectral Dixie dark. Soon, I am sure, he will move away. (And he did, last Saturday, as I knew he would, to the Upper West Side of New York City, with $300 and without a job in sight.)
Ok, so you Worked late at the office again last night. Or you feel as if your entire life is on hold while you finish your M.B.A. You're tired, you're cranky and you're wondering, Why am I doing this?
Joan Bennett stops in front of an art gallery in Chicago. In the window are several prints by Erté. The women are sophisticated, elegant, glamorous, creative. The lines are flowing, graceful. Our Miss January reflects, "You have to wonder what kind of man he is to create something like that. I love to look at women, and his women are special. I'll buy that for my apartment when I get an apartment." There is something about Miss January that reminds one of Erté's women. She was raised in Glen Ellyn, a small town in the flatland outside Chicago. She is tough ("I can sing, dance and box. I hate a man who treats women as inferiors, who takes advantage.I'll stand up and rip his lip off, just pop 'im up the nose"). She is a street fighter. She entered a bikini contest at Mother's, a Chicago club, to earn money to put together a portfolio of photographs. John Casablancas, the head of Elite models, saw her and offered her a job. The next thing she knew, she was flying to France and Germany, with the beginning of a career as an international model. And that's where the comparison to Erté's women comes in. It's as though she belongs in Paris. "Glen Ellyn was always the same. I thought there should be more to life than traditional sex, going to college, finding a rich husband and ending up in the driver's seat of a station wagon--waking up to the sounds of kids playing with their Big Wheels every morning. I didn't want to let life go past. "Less than a year after high school, Joan found herself looking for work in the cities of Europe. Every day, the agency would give her a list of "go-sees," photographers who were looking for models, and off she would go. She polished up her high school French (her mother is a French teacher) and waded in. "There I was, wearing my seven-dollar Michael Jackson watch, showing up for fashion shootings." She talks of the isolation, the adventure, the sudden passions that life overseas can lead to: "I was in a bus station, looking for something to read. The only books in English were by Roald Dahl. He's fantastic. It was like climbing onto an island of English. This trip, I discovered George Orwell. I know that he's good, that he's good even in the classroom, but I always remember books by where I read them. After the Playboy shooting, I took a room in the Hôtel Le Montana, in St.-Germaindes-Prés, above the Café de Flore. Every morning, the sun floods through these ceiling-to-floor windows. I would order a room-service breakfast and read. I could hear the musicians who played at the café." Joan can talk with equal excitement about weekends in the country and the escape after a difficult shooting. She has an ear for sounds. "I spent a weekend at this spot that wasn't even on the map. It was a real break not to have to put on make-up every morning, especially when mornings began with a five-o'clock rooster crowing. I spent the days lying in the sun, listening to classical music and mooing cows. It's a nice combination." She laughs when she recalls her early social encounters. "There was a guy in Munich whose idea of a first date was going to a nude beach. I got to watch him play Frisbee with his dog. Very funny. The next day, I was sunburned in places you wouldn't believe." Being on the move makes romance difficult. "I met a fairly well-known man, and then an assignment made me leave in the middle of my feelings for him. You can't conduct a relationship looking at each other's pictures in magazines." Not that she will settle down any time soon. "I'll be his guest for dinner. He can wash the dishes the next morning." For the time being, Joan is committed to her career, shuttling between Chicago and Europe. Where will it end? Playboy Contributing Photographer Richard Fegley thought that Joanhad more potential as an actress than any Playmate he's shot in recent years. Alas, Miss Bennett's ideas for the future don't seem to include Hollywood, unless they plan on making a Rocky V with a female lead and filming it in Paris. Joan recalls some of her early career plans. "Well, I took up weight lifting when I was 17, and every thing was up north and firm. It was fun seeing results. I read a fascinating book on nutrition by Jane Brody. Perhaps I'll go to college and study nutrition and physical education. Maybe I'll go to college in Paris...." Notice how Paris keeps coming up in the conversation? This is one girl who won't stay down on the farm.
To be androgynous, Webster's informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man. Sometimes this is recognized only when the chips are, brutally, down--when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love between any two human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes.
It was easy for America to fall in love with actress Diane Lane when, at the age of 13, she made her screen debut opposite Laurence Olivier in "A Little Romance." Both the infatuation and Diane have since grown, as she has filled out more mature teenage roles in such films as "The Outsiders," "Rumble Fish," "Six Pack" and the sartorially memorable "Streets of Fire." Now she co-stars with Richard Gere in Francis Coppola's controversial "The Cotton Club." Contributing Editor David Rensin met with Lane in New York. Says Rensin, "There are 19-year-olds and there are 19-year-olds. Diane Lane is definitely both."
Isidro Loved this guy Teddy. He was Mr. Tourist, every taxi driver's dream. The kind who not only wants to see everything in the guidebook, he wants the same driver every day, because he trusts him and believes whatever the driver tells him. Like he wants the driver to approve of him.
After Warren Beatty, John Derek and Hef, the Playboy photographer is probably the most envied man alive. He wakes up, kisses whomever, packs his aluminum suitcase and heads for the studio, where this month's Playmate is busy undressing, figuring out how best to impress him in her birthday suit. There may be a shortage of family doctors and bomb defusers, but we could start an employment agency with the guys who send letters every month--sheepish grins between the lines--saying, "Hey, you wouldn't happen to need another shootist, would you?" We wish we could hire them all, but there are only so many cameras in America. That's why we are presenting the collection of goofs you see here--to prove the life of a Playboy photographer isn't all glamor and gratification. Though it is, we'll have to admit, almost always fun.
Someone's Born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate or otherwise circumnavigate the Irish meadows to the nearest town and the dearest pub, which is Heeber Finn's.
Not Since Alberto Vargas has an artist so captured the sensuous in lines so simple as did Patrick Nagel, who died last February at the age of 38. Every piece he created showed the same love of women. Every image had an unmistakable edge that took it out of the arena of minor illustration into the eternal. Nagel influenced a generation of illustrators.
In the old days (you know, the late Fifties), hardly a man graduated from college without having made at least one road trip. Back then, there were more than 200 girls' schools around the country, and college men used their precious weekends to visit them all--to chart unknown courses, visit new locales and return relaxed, invigorated and full of stories.
If you are one of those connoisseurs who recall each year of centerfolds as a vintner recalls his vintages, we think you will agree that this was a very good year. If you've forgotten just how good it was, this roundup of the 1984 Playmates will remind you. Not only does it have bite and edge, it has, in the jargon of winetasters, both body and depth. We recommend that you sip--ah, read--slowly.
A Young Lady From Nassau Writes, "My Boyfriend is a scuba Diver and to Celebrate the Holidays he wants us to Make Love Underwater-Is There Any Danger Of My Becoming Pregnant?"
Walden, you's Th' only Mc Buns whut kin write, 'N Ah needs T' order somethin' from this here Catalog.spanish fly don't work, Barf. You's wastin' yo' money.
Please stop sending us those silly silver balloons. While you're at it, you can keep the belly dancers with the singing telegrams and the dogs on roller skates. The same goes for Carlton the clown and Marvin the magician.
The Champagne's in the bucket, Dick Clark's in Times Square, and that can mean only one thing--we've made it through another year. That's reason enough for us to celebrate. And if you don't mind a little confetti in your hair, we'd like you to join us.
Holiday Time--and it's your turn to play host. Tough break? By no means! You can have as much fun as anybody else if you play it right. It does take careful planning, with almost everything done ahead and a minimum of last-minute chores. The idea is for the festivities to virtually run themselves--under your watchful eye, of course. Suggestions that follow are a blueprint for relaxed hostmanship, with enough flexibility to allow for your own spontaneous touches.
To have good manners at a party, you must understand what parties are all about. People do not give parties so their friends will have fun. If that were what they wanted, they'd just send some women and champagne over to your house in a taxi and be done with it. Parties are given for other reasons. The three principal motives are to get noticed and talked about, to climb the social ladder and to repay debts of hospitality. Good etiquette requires that you help your host achieve those objectives.
Not that knowledge isn't a good thing, but do you ever get the feeling that you know too much? Granted, there is a clear and present need to remember certain things--birth control, your automatic-bank-teller code number, how to keep catsup from staining (use club soda). But you can rest assured that you'll never get a table in a good restaurant by knowing the speed of sound or how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The trick in the info-packed Eighties is to keep your mind unsullied by useless information. It's time to strip your personal data base down to bare essentials and discard all the rest. Trust us: You can forget about Julio Iglesias, Morgan Fairchild and Andy Gibb. On the other hand, you really should remember to floss and to fasten your seat belt, and never forget that a straight flush beats four aces.
A Porsche in the garage may be quite Continental, but one in the living room means you're talking land's-speed language. Yes, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche does have other interests besides aerodynamics and horsepower, and his Antropovarius chair is a whole different trip. Most of its vertebrae can be custom-altered for comfort--and the chair itself is a surprise package of seating angles from upright to a full-lounge position. So if you've had a tough day, go home and slip into something more comfortable. With custom-colored leather mated to space-age structuring, the Antropovarius chair is a rocket ride down the highway of great furniture design. Sloopy, hang on!
Since 1948, when that first itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny yellow-polka-dot transistor put a cap on the Tube Age, good things have been coming in smaller and smaller packages. Now, using silicon chips and liquid-crystal displays, engineers can pack yesterday's ICBMs into today's thimbles; soon high tech's high priests will have figured out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin-sized radio. In case you've been looking only at the big picture, you should know that we've entered the age of miniaturization. Small wonder small's so big these days--you may need an electron microscope to watch The Big Sleep tomorrow, only to be awakened in the morning by a clock-radio/coffee maker you're wearing around your neck. Why the big fuss? Because now, more than ever, little things can mean a lot.
"Distant replay"--From the vantage point of middle age, the ex-packer great (and author of instant replay) looks at what the years have done to his life and those of his exteammates--by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap