At right, you see two guys and a gigantic box camera that looks like something Pee-wee Herman would pack for his summer vacation. Meet the 20 x 24 Polaroid Land camera, the state of the art in instant photography from Polaroid. Its prints measure 20"x 24" and develop in 65 seconds. Contributing Photographer Richard Izui, with the help of Polaroid consultant John Reuter, used the 20 x 24 for this year's really big portrait of the top collegiate football players in Playboy's Pigskin Preview. Yes, it's time again for our annual college football forecast, which has been masterminded over the years by our own armchair general manager, Anson Mount. To celebrate Mount's incredible accuracy at picking the winners and to give you something special to ponder as we begin that long Saturday journey into the Rose Bowl known as the college football season, we asked Anson to select his personal Hall of Fame for Playboy & Budweiser Salute the Pigskin Preview. Good sport Kevin Cook helped put together the dream-team package and then briskly turned around to interview Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon for this month's 20 Questions. We asked Cook how to tell McMahon and Mount apart. "Easy," he said. "Anson's the one with the Mozart headband."
Jazz is King The eighth annual Playboy Jazz Festival was held in June at the Hollywood Bowl. M.c. Bill Cosby (upper right), flanked by L.A. mayor Tom Bradley and a few adorable Bunnies kick things off. Below left, B. B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan wail on guitar, while jazz buffs at the sold-out bash boogie their hearts out to traditional and contemporary tunes for two terrific days and nights with the stars.
Playboy, (ISSN 0032-1478), October 1986, Volume 33, Number 10. Published Monthly by Playboy, Playboy Building, 919 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611. Subscriptions: In the United States and its possessions, $56 for 36 issues, $38 for 24 issues, $24 for 12 issues, Canada, $35 for 12 issues. Elsewhere, $35 (U.S. Currency) 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 55230, Boulder, Colorado 80323-5230, and allow 45 days for change. Circulation: Ed Condon, Director/Direct Marketing; Jack Bernstein, Circulation Promotion Director. Advertising: New York: Elaine Hershman, New York Manager: Walter Kuenstler, Marketing Director, 747 Third Avenue, New York 10017; Chicago: 919 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago 60611; Detroit: 3001 West Big Beaver Road, Troy, Michigan 48084; West Coast: Brian Van Mols, Manager, 8560 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles 90069.
The Extraordinary emotional impact of Extremities (Atlantic) tends to blur the inherent flaws of William Mastrosimone's controversial play. Adapted by the author and directed by Robert M. Young, the movie stars Farrah Fawcett as the intended rape victim who miraculously subdues her attacker and decides to kill him for fear of reprisals. The vicious intruder makes her fears seem well founded. He's a maniacal brute named Joe, played with insidious simplicity by James Russo, who starred opposite Susan Sarandon--and, later, Fawcett--in the original New York production. On film, the heroine's plight is spelled out chillingly at the start, when she is abducted from a parking lot by the same snarling predator she's destined to confront again--fighting him off, she escapes but leaves her wallet behind, and thus becomes his easy prey. By the time Joe catches her at home alone and presses a knife to her throat, we're hooked, hanging on every split second of explosive menace. Fawcett's performance is harrowingly true, though somewhat limited in range, with few shades of emotional color between quivering terror and sullen fury.
Mickey Dolenz, the ex-Monkee, was born again this year via MTV's reruns of "The Monkees," a greatest-hits LP and a sold-out four-month tour. Since his first Monkees incarnation, Dolenz has produced and directed plays, TV shows and music videos. Now he's about to direct his first feature film, with a screenplay by Bruce ("The Killing Fields") Robinson. We assigned him to review The Butthole Surfers' "Rembrandt Pussyhorse."
What's Left after Punk Polka? The Polish-American community isn't overjoyed by this new musical development. Punk-polka groups have been sighted in L.A., San Francisco and even Detroit. A writer in the Polish-American Journal says, "Taking the ethnicity out of polka is like making beef Stroganoff with fish." Take that, you silly kids!
Every Year, we like to give you our suggestions for fall reading. When the days grow short and the nights grow cold, there's almost nothing like reading a book in front of the fireplace. Two Simon & Schuster biographies look fascinating: On Acting, by Laurence Olivier, and Lillian Hellman: The Woman Who Made the Legend, by William Wright. Other nonfiction to watch for: The Reckoning: The Challenge to America's Greatness (Morrow), by David Halberstam, is the story of the crisis in the auto industry and part three of Halberstam's trilogy on power in America; also from Morrow, Celebrating Bird: The Life and Times of Charlie Parker, by jazz critic Gary Giddins; Indy 500: More than a Race (McGraw-Hill), in which Tom Carnegie, who has called every Indy race for four decades, tells the inside story; and, from Knopf, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of "Life," told by longtime Life editor and columnist Loudon Wainwright. In fiction, the big news is James Clavell's latest novel, Whirlwind (Morrow), number five in his addictive Asian saga; there's also a new P. D. James mystery, A Taste for Death(Knopf); and finally, from Random House, the long-awaited Answered Prayers, Truman Capote's unfinished novel. It's sure to generate as much hoopla now as the original pieces did when they were published. Happy reading!
This should be the cleanest college football season in history, now that the N.C.A.A. has exposed the poisonous cheeseburger, the corrupt key chain and the decadent T-shirt.
You can't buy a copy of Playboy at a 7-Eleven store these days, but you can buy any number of romance novels. That says quite a bit about our culture. Among other things, it says that women's fantasies are acceptable and men's are not.
I found out tonight that a fellow I have my eye on is 45 years old, and even though I'm nearly a decade younger, I briefly thought, Am I too old for him? He's adorable and hilarious; he'll probably want someone around 24. I got this idea from another guy I had an affair with several years ago, who is now 50 and has a new girlfriend, who is 22. I'm getting old! It's a little depressing!
A friend from California has told me a sure-fire way to interest a woman in sex, a technique as old as India and as new as the most modern research. He says that the right and left halves of the brain differ in mood control. The right side deals with spatial relations and the left side controls language and mathematical functions. Recent research has apparently determined that each half of the brain is also responsible for different emotional states. The right side is largely the source of negative feelings, including depression, critical attitudes and anhedonia (resistance to experiencing pleasure), while the left side tends to generate positive feelings, such as euphoria, sexual enjoyment and the kind of healthy aggression displayed by enthusiastic athletes. Apparently, researchers have found that the two hemispheres alternate in their dominance of our bodies roughly every two hours. That means that the average person will be better at verbal tasks for two hours and then at spatial tasks for the next two hours. Low key, high key, low key, every two hours. Now, get this: Air flow through a person's right and left nostrils seems to affect the pattern of shifts in dominance from one hemisphere to the other. At any given moment, everyone is breathing more through one nostril than through the other. If you don't believe it, check your own nostrils for an entire day and you'll be convinced. Now, according to my friend, a researcher at the Khalsa Foundation for Medical Science in California has found that when air flows through the right nostril, there is greater activity in the left hemisphere, and vice versa. And he has also found that breathing through the previously congested nostril can help stimulate the less active hemisphere. If you block the right nostril, the person breathes through the left nostril, and there is a relative increase in electroencephalogram activity in the right hemisphere. Now, here is the trick: If your date is moody or generally not in the upbeat, high-key attitude you want for sex, ask her to plug her left nostril for 15 minutes. (She can just stuff some cotton up it.) Her mood will shift to the left, happy hemisphere and you're home free. What does the Playboy Advisor have to say about this?--W. L., Gary, Indiana.
What punk rock couldn't do with sexually explicit lyrics it has managed to accomplish with a sexually explicit poster--get a record-company owner busted for "distributing harmful material to minors." The poster, by H. R. Giger, is titled Penis Landscape and comes--or came--folded inside the Dead Kennedys' 1985 LP Frankenchrist. It doesn't come that way now, thanks to Los Angeles authorities who brought charges against Alternative Tentacles Records owner Eric Boucher, better known as the D.K.s' lead singer, Jello Biafra.
For the past few years, it has been common for the media to denigrate the sexual revolution. Esquire proclaimed "The End of Sex" with a wreath on its cover. Time not only declared the revolution over, it ran a cover story on herpes as "The New Scarlet Letter." The Los Angeles Times ran a major story on "sexual addiction" with a straight face. Feminists and fundamentalists united in a campaign against sex, under the guise of an antiporn crusade, and received sympathetic treatment from the press.
Give me just one more hit.... That's not quite the refrain of the song that took over the airwaves a couple of years ago, but it may as well be. Turn on the tube and there he is, doing weird stuff on MTV videos--in one he was Diana Ross and all the Supremes. Switch channels and there he is, being nominated for one award or another, here a Grammy, there an Oscar. Turn on the car radio and he's there, singing or drumming; hit the button to switch stations and he's there, too, and there--and there. Yes, it's safe to assume that there is always a Phil Collins song being played somewhere in the world.
What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
Jeff Cohen was getting exasperated. As Playboy's Managing Photo Editor, he'd trained himself to keep an eye peeled (and a lens polished) for all things sexual, sensuous and exotic. And Wendy O. Williams seemed to fit the bill. Formerly of the group The Plasmatics, now a soloist who has been alternately called "the high priestess of metal," "the dominatrix of the decibels," "the Evel Knievelette of shock rock," Wendy was flattered when Cohen brought up the subject of posing for Playboy but not too interested. Maybe I should appeal to her musical sense, thought Cohen. After all, she's a rock star. She's even been nominated for a Grammy. So he suggested that she do a special shooting for Playboy's Girls of Rock 'n' Roll pictorial (January 1985). Again, Wendy felt honored; but, again, she declined. So Cohen gave it one last try: "All right," he said to Wendy. "If you do a pictorial for us, we'll make sure that we have you doing something truly outrageous. How's that?"
Four-Wheel Drive, as we know it, started around the time that Hitler got some bad advice from his astrologer and decided to see Paris in the spring. In response, we sent an entire generation of males to Europe, along with several million jeeps, so our boys could drive to the V-2 launch pads and bring back all those German scientists who had terrific jobs waiting at places such as Lockheed and General Dynamics. The jeep our soldiers drove during the last big one is the grandfather of virtually every civilian 4x4 vehicle built since. Modern methods and technologies have made tremendous improvements and elaborated on the idea, but, until recently, the basic 4x4 concept remained the same. The salient characteristics were lots of ground clearance, lots of wheel travel, engines with lots of low-end torque but little high-end horsepower, tires the size of millstones, interiors as Spartan as a K.G.B. holding cell, mechanical components that could survive a nuclear attack and minimalist exteriors that looked as if they had been designed by Charles Bronson.
This month features Bruce Willis, co-star with Cybill Shepherd of television's hot series Moonlighting. Willis, whom People magazine nominated as one of 1986's most eligible bachelors, is having a four-star year. His appearance in Seagram's wine-cooler television commercials elevates celebrity endorsement to the level of minitheater, and he stars with Kim Basinger in Blake Edwards' film Blind Date, due for release this Christmas. Our illustration this month is one of our favorite works by the late, legendary illustrator Pat Nagel. When this first appeared in the January 1985 Playboy, we wrote of Nagel, "He created a look for the Eighties, one that combined the free-and-easy openness of West Coast design with the classical style of art deco ... sophisticated, simple, stark and ultimately seductive."
The Eight Men huddled in a slowly moving post-office truck on Constitution Avenue and checked their machine guns, nervously pulling at their hoods. The thought that they might not survive was sobering, but they knew how important this raid was. The Americans would learn a lesson they would never forget.
Miss October studies Japanese art, archaeology, shóu-shù--an Eastern style of self-defense--and shiatsu massage. At shiatsu school, they call her Sachiko, Japanese for "happy child." The name fits. Since she was 11, when she came across a pile of Playboys, she has been happily engaged in the pursuit of Playmatehood. Katherine Hushaw pursues almost everything, in fact. She's a helicopter pilot, an actress with two feature films to her credit, a model (hers were the beautiful buns in the first California Cooler ads), a TV-commercial actress, a radio voice-over artist and a collector of Japanese miniatures called netsuke. She can be found, for now, at Playboy Mansion West, with her fellow Playmates. "Julie McCullough is silly like me," she says. "We laugh about our well-separated breasts."
A man bought a couple of drinks for a woman in a bar and, after some great conversation, asked her if she would like to go to his apartment to continue talking.
We'd heard a rumor that George Lucas' Howard the Duck--the new, $30,000,000 comedy/adventure about a can-tankerous, cigar-chomping duck who's sucked from his planet far, far away into an alley in Cleveland--had a featured role for Playboy, but we weren't sure what kind of role. So we waddled on over to the set.
While it has never really faded from glory, the English-gentleman look in clothes has re-emerged this fall in all its traditional splendor. Subtle combinations of patterns, and suit coats and sports jackets with a slightly suppressed waist combined with spread-collar shirts and paisley and foulard ties characterize this timeless approach to tailoring. Casualwear, on the other hand, has a decidedly American influence. Hand-knit sweaters, sheepskin jackets, wide-wale-corduroy and cavalry-twill slacks give a touch of the West that's an interesting counterpoint to the aristocratic look of today's coats and ties.
It's Been 17 years since Willard (Martin Sheen) went up the Nong River to deal with Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now." Following his mission in Vietnam, Willard took part in the ill-fated 1980 Iranian rescue attempt, received an honorable discharge, then returned to the United States, where he purchased an Athletic Attic franchise in a Marina del Rey shopping mall.
David Chan, Playboy Contributing Photographer, standing in a stone gazebo just behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art and focusing his Nikon on a University of Pennsylvania coed, was unaware that he was only yards from the steps a boxer named Rocky Balboa had sprinted in his first film. Instead, Chan was mesmerized by the way in which the sunset created pillar-shaped shadows that danced across his model's face. Balboa wouldn't have noticed the shadows. Neither would most of us. But Chan, celebrating his 20th anniversary with Playboy, was concentrating once more on the back-to-school circuit, this time reprising his famed 1979 Girls/Women of the Ivy League pictorial. With a small cluster of assistants in his slip stream, he was bouncing up the Eastern Seaboard, pitching tent in hotel rooms and interviewing women from what some consider to be the nation's most respected campuses.
College football is going through a revolutionary upheaval, and the result will be a much better game for both fans and athletes. The people most disturbed by the changes are those rich but bird-brained alumni supporters who will no longer be able to brag about buying a star player for their local university.
When we launched Playboy's Pigskin Preview in 1957, we had no way of knowing it would become a 30-year phenomenon. We didn't know that selection to the Playboy All-America team would become one of college football's most dreamed-about honors, that the Playboy All-America team would one day influence the Heisman Trophy balloting or that future football heroes would take their first three-point stances with visions of Playboy All-America Weekends dancing in their heads. If we had anticipated the success Anson Mount would have as a football forecaster, we might have become gamblers.
While we haven't seen any official tallies on the matter, astute trend spotters agree that the cocktail is making a comeback. The renewed interest is evident on both sides of the bar. It's a symbiotic relationship--the enthusiasm of patrons serves as inspiration for bartenders, and they, in turn, compete with one another to see who can create the best renditions of various drink types: the crispest martini, the smoothest old fashioned, the tangiest margarita. Customers play a hand in the cocktail game, too, ferreting out the best of the best in bars, restaurants and cafés. Word of these winners spreads quickly through the cocktail underground, conferring instant popularity on the place of origin. As a result of this attention, we're seeing a spate of captivating new drinks and clever variations on the golden oldies. Such potions, often designated house specials, are directed toward the educated palate. For example, Felidia Ristorante--a hot Manhattan restaurant--is renowned for its spectacular martinis. Bartender Ŝime Peroŝ uses a high proportion of gin to vermouth, with a special method of mixing. He neither shakes nor stirs but swirls the liquid in a mixing glass with large ice cubes, holding his palm flat against the glass. That, he says, registers the optimal moment when the drink is properly chilled yet not diluted (continued on page 172) Best of the House (continued from page 148) by excessive mixing. He also insists on a "thin, fine, stemmed glass" and a pitted olive--no lemon, please.
Number nine came by his goof ball rep honestly--wearing wrap-around shades and a Mohawk, hanging from a 25th-floor balcony in Hawaii, inventing Rozelle sportswear as a way to flip the bird to the N.F.L. commissioner--but Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon is not a cartoon character. He's just a spontaneous guy.
Luma Telecom, Inc., of Santa Clara, California, has taken a quantum leap forward with the Luma Telecom Video Telephone, a communication device so revolutionary you almost have to see it in operation to believe it. When two Telecom Video phones are hooked up(over regular telephone lines), all you do is push a SEND button and the person at the other end receives a crisp, clear black-and-white image of the sender on his built-in three-inch phone monitor. You can send one image or change it at intervals. And an optional printer enables you to make 21/8-inch copies of whatever is on the screen. There is also a handy screen directory that holds as many as 100 names and numbers.
"Ordinary People" -- These are the folks Meese and his gang are trying to protect from themselves: The Folks who visit a suburban tape-rental store in the nation's heartland to pick up Their Saturday-Night Videos, Adult Films. They Tell Susan Squire What they're taking home, and why