What do you do when your divorce becomes the topic for every major news outlet in the country? When an apocryphal story that you sleep with a trumpet becomes hot gossip? If you're Roxanne Pulitzer, you play it for laughs. In this month's Prize Pulitzer, America's most famous divorce goes public in a lively question-and-answer session, conducted by Reg Potterton, and a very personal and hilarious perspective on those headlines as interpreted by Contributing Photographer Richard Fegley. We wish Roxanne better luck in her next marital mission, should she choose to accept one. She, and you, might be well advised first to read How to Live with Another Person, by our man in theoretical lifestyles, regular contributor Bruce Jay Friedman. He once wrote a book about being a lonely guy; now he's afraid that moving in with the one you love may be a violation of natural law. The illustration is by Dave Calver.
Playboy, (ISSN 0032-1478), June, 1985, Volume 32, Number 6. 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 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 80322, and allow 45 days for change. Marketing: Ed Condon, Director/Direct Marketing; Jack Bernstein, Circulation Promotion Director. Advertising: Charles M. Stentiford, Advertising Director; Joe Mangione, Advertising Promotion Director; Jeffrey Kleinman, Craig Vander Ploeg, Senior Associate Managers; Jay Remer, National Alcoholic Beverages Marketing Manager; Brian Van Mols, National Automotive Marketing Manager, 747 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10017; Linda Malanga, Chicago 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.
A good way to make sports predictions is to analyze statistics. Taking a peek at the team physician's private files is even better. Being a blood relative, of an aging athlete's bookie is probably the best. But the most intriguing predictions come from a clairvoyant satirist. The following are by that swami of swat, Lenny Kleinfeld.
David Ritz began work on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye (McGraw-Hill) several years before the sweet-voiced Motown star was shot by his father in April 1984. He was therefore able to lace together Gaye's own points of view, as collected in a series of interviews, with the remembrances of most of those who knew him well (a glaring exception: Motown founder Berry Gordy). Ritz tends toward psychoanalysis, but that may be the best way to create order out of Gaye's chaotic life. He was a deeply troubled man, battered as a child by his father, subject to extreme stage fright and ambivalent toward women. Much to Ritz's credit, Gaye emerges here as a believable character and a profound artist who deserved the deep feelings most of us retain for him. This is a compelling book, as fine as Brother Ray, Ritz's study of Ray Charles.
Tull Late For Jethro? Jethro Tull's leader, Ian Anderson, reflects on the band's inability to draw big audiences in the United States: "We used to play to 90,000-odd people in L.A. Now we'd be hard pressed to play to 20,000. People want dance-type feels and tempos--something to lose weight to." Anderson insists that while 36 is not his age, "It is my waist size." --Steph Paynes
Now and then, in this age of electronic keyboards, it's nice to be reminded just how evocative the right pair of hands can be on a good old grand piano. It's the touch that catches you in the acoustic performances on Wall Matthews (Clean Cuts), and Matthews uses his to tease a full orchestral sound out of the keys in this debut solo album. He performs 11 of his own compositions, plus Lennon and McCartney's Across the Universe, and all of them are wonderfully lyrical and moody. They defy categorization, so the best way to describe these songs, and Matthews' way with them, is to say that we've listened to this album at least a dozen times and haven't begun to tire of it.
Let's Hear it for the Boy: Little Richard, whose life story will soon be on film, says that if he could choose the person to play him, he'd pick Michael Jackson. Richard says, "He's a real guy; he's a man who loves God and loves his mother. The only difference between me and Michael is that I was gay and he's not." Ah, but could Michael sing Tutti Frutti?
Eight years have passed since Pumping Iron redefined bodybuilding as a sport and moved Arnold Schwarzenegger a giant step up the ladder toward movie stardom. Now producer-director George Butler is back with Pumping lron II: The Women (Cinecom), another razzledazzle documentary about the Caesars World Cup Championship, a competition staged especially for filming in Las Vegas in 1983. Moviewise, this quasi sequel looks a mite more rigged than the original, but there's plenty of maidenly musculature and emotional tension on display during the practice sessions, plus the pep talks and parading that take place prior to the spectacular onstage showdown. Pumping Iron II poses a question that gains considerable momentum form reel to reel: Will the judges favor the traditional standards of female bodybuilding, represented by sultry Rachel McLish and Lori Bowen and Carla Dunlap, or will they give the nod to Australian superathlete Bev Francis, whose deltoids many a male might envy? I'll confess that the sight of taut loins and straining ligaments where we're used to curvaceous softness is disconcerting at first. But all the strong-arm stuff has a sneaky kind of sex appeal after a while, and these may well be the women of the future. Get set, guys--but don't panic, for Pumping Iron II provides lively entertainment without kicking sand in your face. [rating]3 bunnies[/rating]
Idol Gossip: Word has it that Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd will team up to save the world from nuclear destruction in a spoof called Spies Like Us, to be directed by John Landis.... Director Trevor (Cats) Nunn has been tagged by Paramount to helm Lady Jane, a period film based on the life of Lady Jane Grey, who reigned for nine days as queen of England in the mid-16th Century. Helena Bonham Carter, an 18-year-old English actress relatively unknown to American audiences, will play the title role. The rest of the cast will be composed largely of English actors, including Mathew Guinness, son of Sir Alec.... Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges and Peter Coyote have been set to star in Columbia's Jagged Edge, a courtroom suspense drama. Close will play a lawyer defending a newspaper publisher (Bridges) accused of murdering his wife. Richard (Return of the Jedi) Marquand will direct from a script by Joe (Flashdance) Eszterhas.... Sally Field will coproduce and star in Murphy's Romance, a love story about a single mother and her romance with a gray-haired drugstore owner. James Garner will play her paramour and Martin Ritt will direct.... Steven Spielberg will be co-executive producer of Paramount's Young Sherlock Holmes, a romance-mystery in which the youthful English shamus begins his lifelong friendship with Dr. Watson, falls in love and solves a mystery involving the supernatural. Barry (Diner) Levinson will direct.
Considering that most sportswriters I know are drunks, speed freaks, adulterers, hopeless chain smokers or bad harmonizers (often all five if it's somebody I really want to hang out with), I find it amusing every spring when many of them turn lyrical as they sit down at their typing machines. Baseball does it. Along comes baseball season and guys who later in the summer will be writing their normal hardhitting, two-sentence paragraphs--"Fast-baller Jesus Marquez likes to throw at white people. His father was a doorman"--suddenly begin to use words like ephemeral and catharsis. As it happens, ephemeral and catharsis were never a problem in the home where I grew up. My grandmother's mustard plaster usually cured them in no time at all.
I remember your dad," said one of the survivors of the U.S.S. Longshaw, introducing himself, pumping my arm. We were at a hotel outside Philadelphia along with 20 or so of his shipmates and their wives, who had gathered after almost 40 years for a first reunion since their destroyer had been blown from under them and sunk off the coast of Okinawa Jima in May 1945. These were the lucky boys. There had been a crew of about 275 aboard the Longshaw that day, and 86 of them were killed, including my father, a 28-year-old lieutenant from Seattle, the executive officer of the ship. I was three when it happened and never knew him, so when this former enlisted man, now in his 60s, stepped up with what seemed like it was going to be a particular memory, I got very damned excited.
I am in charge of pledge week at my fraternity. Originally, we were a liberal fraternity that did not believe in hazing, but we discovered that without some rite of passage, no one wanted to join. It was my job to terrorize the new pledge class. First I told them that on initiation night, they would have to have sex with a sheep, in front of the brothers. They believed me, since they knew I had connections in farm country. The next day, I told them that the sheep had died--one of the brothers had gotten carried away. However, the event was still on--they would simply have to have sex with a dead sheep. The next day, I told them that the plan had been changed: The brothers had hired a hooker, and the pledges would have sex with her on initiation night. The fraternity didn't have a lot of money to spend; but even if she was cheap, she wasn't badlooking. The next day, I told them that we had found out why the hooker was cheap: She was a he. The event was still on, though the roles were reversed. The hooker had just returned from a vacation in Haiti, and since the brothers really did have the pledges' best interest at heart, it had been decided that they could take along condoms for the hooker to use; they didn't want to catch AIDS, right? I took the pledges, in the back of a U-Haul van, out into the country, where in the course of the evening they were forced to do something that soiled their clothes somewhat. That made them brothers, and we got drunk. The next morning, I was cleaning the U-Haul, saw all their clothes and decided to be a nice guy. I took the mess to the local laundromat and did a load of wash. I was pulling all the clothes out of the dryer when my hand encountered a gloppy mess. I pulled out a couple of condoms. The guy at the washer next to me looked up and said, incredulously, "You wash your rubbers?" So now the guys at the fraternity want to know, is it safe to wash rubbers?--R. B., Tampa, Florida.
Ely, Nevada, is a small mining community whose oldest working brothel dates back to the early 1900s. Although hundreds of bachelor diggers once hacked a living from the copper pits on the edge of a city of 9000, the copper is long gone and the population has shrunk to about half that.
In the war between good and evil that has marked the Eighties, the skirmish that occurred in Wheeler, Texas, should not go unrecorded. Maybe future historians will be able to determine which side won.
With all due respect to Lee Iacocca, Sparky Anderson must be the best thing to hit the beleaguered city of Detroit in a long time. When he was hired to take over as manager of the Detroit Tigers three months into the 1979 season, the team was in a nose dive almost as deep as the auto industry's. Cars weren't selling; the Tigers sure weren't winning. So on his first day on the job, Sparky announced that within five years--by 1984--the Tigers would win it all, would become the world champions of baseball. Baseball writers scoffed--"Sparky Announces a five-year plan," one headline sneered. After all, hadn't he been fired the previous year by the Cincinnati Reds'? Despite a reputation for canniness with the press (and for cheerfully mangling the English language), wasn't it likely that ol' Sparky had seen his best days'?
Let's Say you go to the doctor one day complaining of the sniffles and he gives you a pill. Let's say it's the wrong pill--there's been some mistake--and it doesn't cure you at all. Let's say it's an experimental pill and it makes you extremely paranoid instead. Let's say you work for Bank One in Columbus, Ohio, part of a regional banking conglomerate that issues MasterCards throughout the United States, and that the first effect of your paranoia is this: You become convinced that a member of the executive board of directors of Bank One, Mr. John R. Parsons, does not exist.
The divorce trial was lurid, and when it was over in November 1982, the greatest name in American journalism--Pulitzer--had been publicly defamed in a welter of allegations that ran from incest and homosexuality to adultery, black magic, drug smuggling, drug abuse and threats of murder.
Ten years later, when I was long out of the Service and working the turnaround wheel at Betelgeuse Station, Fazio still haunted me. Not that he was dead. Other people get haunted by dead men; I was haunted by a live one. It would have been a lot better for both of us if he had been dead; but as far as I knew, Fazio was still alive.
If you, like us, do a little extra in the spring to get the abdominals ready for public display in the summer, then you certainly don't want to put your hard-won muscles into a funky, faded pair of swim trunks. Wise up. Better packaging produces better sales. Why should something soft and slinky at the pool talk with a guy whose swim trunks look like Munster, Indiana, when she can talk with a guy who's wearing the entire state of Hawaii on his tush? This summer, prints are happening. There are knee-top jams and boxers, too. Bikinis abound. The water's fine. Go for it, sport!
When Devin Reneé De Vasquez first visited Chicago, in September 1983, people who saw her asked, "Who is that pretty young girl?" Now they ask, "Who is that beautiful young woman?" We seldom get to watch a Playmate grow up, but our relationship with Miss June goes back several years. In 1981, while she was a sophomore majoring in accounting and marketing at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Playboy Contributing Photographer David Chan scouted the campus for our Girls of the Southeastern Conference feature and Devin decided to apply. What prompted her? "Funny you should ask," she says with a laugh. "I had given a talk on nudity for my freshman speech class. It was at 7:30 A.M.; I woke a lot of people up with that speech. Basically, I view beauty as a gift, like having a good singing voice or the ability to dance. When I tried out, I had never even seen Playboy, but I knew what it was. A friend and I just wanted to see who else was trying out. The next thing I knew, I was in the magazine." The rest is the kind of history that happens only down South. One of the other girls who posed--fully clothed--was kicked out of her sorority; another was evicted from her building. As for Devin: "I lost a student job with the state revenue department. I asked the person who fired me, 'What does this have to do with my job?' What hypocrites! How can they buy the magazine, then have the nerve to criticize?" Devin, of course, landed on her feet. After all, she'd been living on her own since she turned 16. "I never wanted to be taken care of. I have my own American Express card. I'm a grown-up person." After the Girls of the S.E.C. pictorial, Devin reviewed her priorities. "I realized I was trying to do too much. I had been holding down two jobs and going to school. I'd come home from work exhausted, and I was neglecting my studies. So I decided to go out and make enough money to finish college without having to worry about the rent." She began modeling, appearing in local TV commercials in Baton Rouge and in showrooms for Danskin in Dallas. In the fall of 1982, she landed a nonspeaking extra's role in Dixie: Changing Habits, a made-for-TV movie starring Suzanne Pleshette and Cloris Leachman. One day, she decided to visit Chicago, to see if the big city offered more opportunity. She called David Chan, packed her bags and arrived with $50 in her pocket. "When I showed up, I was paralyzed with a sort of shyness. If people stared at me, I wouldn't take it as a compliment. I would wonder if I had food hanging from my mouth." The people, of course, were staring for a more obvious reason. Devin's exotic blend of Spanish and Cajun tends to hook people by the eyeballs. (Her smile, however, is all-American. "People don't ask me if I speak English," she laughs.) "The attention was kind of disconcerting. People kept asking me if I was Jenny on All My Children. Others thought I looked like Jennifer Beals or a dark Farrah Fawcett. Guys kept coming up to me and saying, 'You look just like Apollonia.' These days, I just want someone to come up to me and say, 'You look like Devin De Vasquez.'" Nowadays, Devin exudes confidence and poise. She is working for Elite, one of the top agencies in the world. "I know what I want out of life," she says. "You can put me into any situation and I'll adjust. I've discovered that what you give out is what you get back. I've been striving to be a better model, a better friend, a better lover, and the results are starting to come back to me." She tells of a current relationship. He and she show up at parties together and exchange looks but not words, leaving other people to wonder what's passing between them. Sometimes she wears his clothes. They save their talking for late hours, over the phone, from two to four in the morning, from points across the country. The rest of the day, she is strictly business. She rises around 8:30, exercises and showers, then calls the modeling agency to check in. She spends the day visiting photographers or working on assignments. When she goes home, she cooks, reads, watches TV, exercises and writes poetry. Most of her poems are about love. "I'm a romantic," Devin admits. "I love to be loved and I'm very loyal, both in friendship and in romance." She also has a sense of humor. On a photo session in the bayou country, a seminude Devin was poling a small boat through what she desperately feared were alligator-infested waters ("I can't swim!") when she rounded a bend and came upon about 30 good ol' boys in a duckhunting camp. "Two of the guys were asleep when I floated by and I just want to let them know that it really happened--a crew from Playboy was photographing a girl without clothes on, and they missed it. "what are her plans for the future? Travel, for one thing. "I never knew my real father. My mother and stepfather moved around the country a lot--from California to Detroit. I struck out on my own at 16. Now I'd like to visit Madrid--my father's birthplace--and discover something about my roots." Other plans? "I would like to treat myself to a real vacation. Maybe Venice." She and her American Express card are ready to go, so get the name right, hotel clerks and maître d's: It's Devin Reneé DeVasquez. You'll be seeing a lot of her.
You should know," the businessman told the secretary he had just hired, "that it's a man's world. And that this," he added, tapping his crotch, "is the ultimate authority."
You've just finished the annual physical and you're eager to get back to work. Your doctor, though, is about to launch into his yearly speech about your lifestyle--how you work too hard, don't eat sensibly enough, worry too much, overindulge. You also know what he'll suggest: a diet regimen that will probably read like something the ayatollah cooked up.
Living with another person. Can it be done? You bet. And it is being done, in villages and municipalities all over the country, with results ranging from good all the way up to swell.
Bolt that door! Of course, the burglar chain, too. You're in the bigs now, guy: They come through the walls with jackhammers. Bolt it? Christ, weld it shut. Hey, come on. If easy were all you wanted, you would have stayed in Des Moines, right? You got through the day, didn't you? That's more than a lot of people in this town can say--probably more than a lot of people in this town want to say.
As we are increasingly bombarded by hulking athletes trying to sell us everything from beer to various-sized trucks, we couldn't resist asking our premier film critics to assess the jocks' performances. We persuaded Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to take a break from "At the Movies." Then we locked them in a darkened room in our Chicago headquarters and forced them to watch more commercials than humans should be allowed to view at one sitting. Miraculously, they agreed on the best and the worst of the bunch. They also pretty much agreed on which ones were worthy of praise and which were sins against mankind. We've highlighted those at right. But there's more than the very good and the very bad--there's also the very in-between. Here's their report:
"Always I have admired the female body. When I was a boy of 13 or 14 in Trieste, there was a beautiful piazza in the center of town where I would go for walks with friends, and on one side of the piazza there were two statues of naked women. Even so young, I always stared at them when we passed."
Tom Watson, a 14-year veteran of the professional golf tour, is regarded as the natural successor to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Perhaps the most consistently winning player in the game today, Watson is a six-time recipient of the annual Byron Nelson Award for the most victories on the P.G.A. Tour. His career wins include such major tournaments as the U.S. Open and the British Open (five times) and the Masters (twice). He is currently the second-ranking money winner of all time; but then, he's only 35, and golf is the proverbial sport for life. Warren Kalbacker met with Watson at his home course, the Kansas City Country Club, before the start of the season. "It was a cold day and the links were deserted," says Kalbacker. "But Watson displayed top form in that other major area of golf competition: clubhouse talk."
You can start melting the butter now. This story is going to make you and Orville Redenbacher very happy. Way back in the late Forties, when growing families huddled around small boxes that looked like radios with strange windows in the front--back when the highlight of a night's entertainment was watching a man juggle some plates--most folks thought that was as good as that new thing called television would get. It would be a nice little novelty. But with fairly fuzzy picture quality and with the sound coming out of a three-inch speaker, that newfangled box would never be able to rival the movie-theater or concert experience. And for a very long time, the detractors were right. If you just wanted to watch something, you turned on the TV. If you wanted to experience something, you had to buy a ticket.
All you see are video tapes everywhere. Video stores are now more common than salad bars. They're even renting and selling software in supermarkets. And you can't tell the players without a score card. So here it is: an early tip sheet on the best of the newest in home video.
Remember when you used to rub your body with baby oil and iodine to acquire a drop-dead tan? Fortunately, the sun has set on that dumb idea and has risen on some slick ones--tanning lotions that are designed to get you as mocha as a coconut with a minimum of burning and keep you bronzed all the way through Labor Day. Since every brand from Aramis to Deep Tan-X has its particular blend of oils and chemicals, your best bet is to read the labels and pick a degree of protection that best fits your complexion. It took us days to choose the four screens and lotions squeezed out below on our models' lovely backs. Yeah, it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.
You'd think a high-technology field such as photography could easily outshine the weapons industry, but it has taken centuries to get a camera to work as simply as the crossbow--point the thing and shoot. Now there's a whole slew of bumbleproof 35mm cameras just waiting to be aimed and fired. All the new super-automatics pictured here boast features such as automatic speed setting, focus and film winding and rewinding (one even advances the film to the end of the roll automatically and then rewinds it as you shoot), but you don't have to know all the jargon. All you have to do is remember to slide the lens cover back. Automation has its limits, after all.
"The Real Stuff"--Here's everything Tom Wolfe didn't tell you about America's top air ace, recalled in his own words and those of his wife and flying buddies. For starters, he admits he entered flight training partly to get out of K.P.--by Chuck Yeager with Leo Janos