Playboy (ISSN 0032-1478), February 1994, volume 41, number 2. Published monthly by Playboy in national and regional editions, Playboy, 680 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60611. Second-class postage paid at Chicago, Illinois and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 56162. Subscriptions: in the U.S., $29.97 for 12 issues. Postmaster: Send address change to Playboy, P.O. Box 2007, Harlan, Iowa 51537-4007.
Last Month, to begin our 40th-anniversary year, we showed you where we've been and where we're going. This month it's time to look at where we are. Call this our social studies issue, complete with fieldwork. King of the World is an exposé of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich by sleuthing reporter Jim Hougan. Rich is a scary fiction come to life (not unlike the renegade arms dealer in John le Carré's thriller The Night Manager)--a shadowy commodities broker based in Switzerland who sneaks oil past UN sanctions for huge profits. His latest plot is to exploit the free-for-all markets of eastern Europe before Interpol spots him. From that Alpine redoubt we descend to the confines of the inner city. To Live & Die in L.A., by lce-T, chronicles the hard life of gangsters, straight up. Taken from The Ice Opinion (as told to Heidi Siegmund, St. Martin's Press), it's an uncensored look at desperate black teens one fight away from going loc and losing their lives (Mike Benny did the artwork). Gang culture, fringe culture: In A Ring in Her Navel, bold recent college graduate Vicki Glembocki visits the back room of a piercing parlor to find out just who's participating in the current craze of body, ah, art. Ouch! (Envisioned by artist David Hodges.)
The painting reproduced in this poster was commissioned from Salvador Dali by Playboy in 1966. The original hangs in the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. It is one of several commissions given to major international artists to create artwork entitled ''The Playmate as Fine Art.''
The crowd at Slim's in San Francisco has never been my favorite. It's mostly a sports-coat-and-scotch gang, and no one really thrashes there anymore. But this past June I saw the place sold out and coming apart, people reaching out to take the performers for a ride on a wave of empathy and shouts and surpassed expectations. No, it wasn't an evening of bitter blues or screaming death metal or hip-hop--it was two nights of spoken word performance called Howls, Raps and Roars.
A Rich, challenging cinematic treat, playwright John Guare's spry screen adaptation of Six Degrees of Separation (MGM) injects new zest into his international stage hit. Decidedly not for audiences seeking escape, the movie, directed by Fred Schepisi, opens up Guare's provocative one-set play based on an actual incident. Will Smith, better known as TV's Fresh Prince of Bel Air, dissembles royally as the young hustler who passes himself off to wealthy New Yorkers as the son of Sidney Poitier. He also pretends to be on intimate terms with their offspring in the best Ivy League schools. Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland perform brilliantly as his gullible victims, a Fifth Avenue couple whose double-dealing in the art world may be as big a scam as any perpetrated by their' fast-talking night visitor. ''Let's not be star-fuckers,'' says Channing coyly, a seriocomic wonder who believes she just might be cast by Poitier to be an extra in his new movie based on Cats. Only the kids home from college see the truth in Guare's biting satire about parents and children, haves and have-nots, right and wrong and the thin line separating everybody on the planet ''by only six degrees.'' This witty brainteaser offers no simple answers but cleverly weaves its questions into a guilt-edged parlor game.[rating]4 bunnies[/rating]
In the U.S. from France for the New York Film Festival preview of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue, opening here soon, Juliette Binoche sips Perrier and wonders aloud why she usually gets the sex-pot roles in her English-language movies. ''I am always surprised to be offered them,'' she notes, smiling seductively. Binoche first caused heat rash wowing Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then played the temptress who destroys Jeremy Irons' career and marriage in last year's Damage. ''In any case,'' she adds, ''you don't play eroticism as such, you just deal with the story and situation.'' For her ''harsh, furious performance'' as the young widow of a famous composer in Three Colors: Blue, she won the Venice Festival's Best Actress award.
''I'm a Bonnie and Clyde fan,'' drawls country singer and urban cowboy Billy Ray Cyrus, who has seen the movie--the only video he owns--more than 20 times. ''I like it because it's real, and I'm into reality.'' The Nashville star is also inspired by home reruns of tearjerkers such as The Prince of Tides, Stealing Home and Brian's Song. Musician bios including The Buddy Holly Story and the fictional Eddie and the Cruisers strike a familiar chord. ''Another I like real well is Field of Dreams,'' Cyrus says, ''but then, I always wanted to be a baseball player--and Tommy Lasorda is a good friend.'' Alas, the 32-year-old singing sensation ain't so sensational when it comes to remembering movie titles. Trying to recall the name of a favorite recent rental--My Girl, with Macaulay Culkin--Cyrus went blank: ''You know, the one where the kid gets stung by a bunch of bees, then dies. The Goodbye Girl, right?''
This May Be the era when mainstream publishing rediscovers sex. The recent flood of volumes embracing the subject includes anthologies of erotic classics, first-person reports from the field, explorations of spiritual sexuality, the everpopular instructional guides and a survey of the new technology of erotica.
Most generations acquire a label that sticks. The Fifties were named the Silent Generation for the cautious young people living through the political correctness of McCarthyism. The Sixties saw the flowering of the Woodstock Generation, an era of sex and drugs and Vietnam war protests. The Seventies were the Me Decade and the Eighties brought us yuppies and baby boomers from hell who believed that greed is good.
My wife and I like our sex hot--and cold. We turn off the air-conditioning, which heats things up, then she slides ice cubes all over my hot body, and I do the same to her. Trouble is, the ice melts and makes a mess. Do you know a way to get iced without getting wet?--F. T., Key West, Florida.
Two years ago Sanford Braver, a psychology professor at Arizona State University, realized that the scholarly articles on sexual harassment he'd been reading didn't seem scientific or enlightening.
We first heard the descriptive phrase of our title in a profile of novelist Richard Price. Price was discussing his book about drug dealers in the South Bronx. Writer Ron Rosenbaum captured the moment: ''Crack, needle drugs, AIDS and crime are killing off so many victims in the ghettos, both predator and prey, that the plagues are beginning to burn themselves out for lack of new souls and bodies to consume. 'You know what the cops call that?' Price asks. 'The self-cleaning oven.'''
The war on drugs is over, but no one has told the frontline combatants. The shooting goes on because this country's top brass, from the president on down, are afraid to go public with the truth. Like Vietnam, this war is no longer fought with a strategic expectation of victory, Instead, it has degenerated into ritualistic mayhem with no useful end in sight.
In a row house in a working-class London neighborhood 40 years ago, a young boy was given a clarinet by his father. The boy failed miserably on the instrument. Had he succeeded, he might never have tried the guitar few years later, and we might still he listening to Paul Anka, wearing butch was hairdos and believing everything our parents and politicians told us. The boy was Pete Townshend, and he has had as much to do with hard, pure, angry, irreverent, loud rock and roll--and all that it wrought--as anyone else.
In A Borrowed Cabin, in a northern wood, Walt Baffen welcomed winter. He had sacks and tins of food in the root cellar and a moose quarter in the cache. He had three cords of firewood. He had a bookshelf full of paperback classics and a propane lantern to read them by. He had a shortwave wireless and a carton of spare batteries.
IT's A Renaissance Year for American carmakers. General Motors and Ford are running hot with new versions of old classics such as the Camaro and the Mustang, and Chrysler's sporty Neon subcompact is certain to challenge Saturn and Honda. Undaunted, the imports are battling back with their best shots. There are so many new models to choose from, even experts are befuddled. Playboy once again assembled a panel of automotive gurus to assess the best 1994 cars in a variety of categories. And for the fourth consecutive year, as part of our annual new-car review, we present Playboy's Car of the Year award. The winner is pictured overleaf. Enjoy the ride. Hottest Pocket Rocket: With the availability of so many pint-size-yet-potent cars, our panelists tied in the voting. ''Lighter weight and major steering and handling improvements make the Celica GT the niftiest ride this side of $20,000,'' said Motor Trend editor-atlarge Don Sherman. Playboy Contributing Editor Ken Gross agreed, calling the Celica ''a junior Supra for half the price, with the looks and nearly all the punch of its older brother.'' USA Today auto editor James R. Healey thought the Acura Integra GS-R was ''a sweet piece of work--almost German--with the world's best shifter.'' Also an Integra GS-R fan, racer Willy T. Ribbs said, ''You won't go bankrupt going fast in this one.'' Car and Driver columnist Brock Yates called the Ford Probe GT ''cheap thrills,'' adding that it's less money than the equally zoomy Integra GS-R and quicker than the rest. Playboy Senior Editor David Stevens is waiting for the Golf GTI V6 (coming this spring). ''It should be a hot little handful like the Mini Cooper was,'' he said. (Steven's vote was based on his driving the new six-cylinder $19,975 Jetta III GLX late in our selection process. ''The Jetta was about as sweet a little runner as I've ever experienced, with a terrific shifter,'' said Stevens. ''In fact, I kept sneaking out to buy packs of cigarettes just to drive the car--and I don't even smoke.'')
Chevrolet's Camaro is celebrating its 27th year. With the dramatic looks, V8 muscle and crisp handling of the latest edition--the Z28 convertible--Camaros will be turning heads well into the next century.
Would You Mind showing us the ring in your navel?'' asked Wally Kennedy, host of AM Philadelphia, while I sat in the heat of the lights as a guest on his morning talk show. Without a thought, I untucked my shirt and wedged down my belt to show viewers across the Philadelphia area the silver ring through the skin above my navel. Of course, I couldn't see those people, but I could see the three cameramen, eyes glued on my stomach as they zoomed in-- the same men who, minutes before, had instinctively crossed their legs when I explained the popularity of genital piercing. I had to laugh. There I was, a 21-year-old Penn State English major, born and raised in dreary Erie, exposing my bare skin on live TV during ratings week, as the supposed expert on body piercing. What a long strange trip it had been since I first stepped into the Forbidden Fruit Body Piercing Salon in State College, Pennsylvania.
Hi, Dolly, hello, horsey, how's my girl?'' Julie Lynn Cialini coos to a horse she has only just met. We were walking along Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and she charged right up and kissed the carriage-pulling nag on the nose while Dolly's driver shivered with cold--or perhaps envy. Miss February is definitely a soft touch when it comes to animals. When modeling jobs take her away from her Rochester, New York home--and her five cats--she takes on surrogate pets. In Milan she supplied food every day for a homeless pooch; in Miami Beach she adopted a cat. ''I get upset when I'm in Miami because there are so many strays,'' she says. ''Someday, when my career takes off, I want to try to make things better for animals.'' Miss February loves another canine species: the underdog. Her own life has been a triumph over tough times. Her parents divorced when she was nine, and Julie and her two sisters were raised by their mother. ''Mom did a great job, but she had to work hard. She took out a second mortgage on the house just to raise us,'' she recalls. School was no joy, either.
Light Snow Falls through the darkness as a gray Mercedes glides out of the driveway of one of the oldest and most spectacular mansions in Switzerland. As the car winds its way into the mountains above the lake, windshield wipers brushing at the snow, a man in a black cashmere coat and a dark blue suit sits in a cone of light in the backseat, reading. Not far behind, a chase car flirts with the Mercedes' rear bumper, surging closer and closer, then falls back. Inside, three Israeli bodyguards scan the road, alert for the possibility of a bounty hunter's ambush or a terrorist's kidnapping.
Cowboy Boots have found a home off the range, and cap-toe clodhoppers, military lace-ups and ankle-high Chelsea styles are showing up where only brogues, wing tips and slip-ons once trod. In fact, boots are being worn with just about everything from dinner jackets to baggy denim shorts. (Troy Aikman wore black leather cowboy boots with a tuxedo in our Quarterback Chic fashion feature last month.) But whatever the look, take time to find a pair of boots that really fits. For maximum comfort, your heel should move up and down slightly in the back, and the boot's interior should be smooth and seamless. And if rugged workman-style boots work best for you, make sure that they're fully waterproof.
If there were a trading card for sportscaster Chris Berman, the stats would read: 6'5'', 250 pounds, Brown University; covers several positions for cable sports network ESPN; hosts ''NFL Gameday,'' an Emmy-winning Sunday morning pregame football show, and ''NFL Primetime,'' a Sunday evening highlight show; during the baseball season broadcasts play-by-play and wraps up the week's diamond action with Sunday's ''Baseball Tonight.''
Playboy expands your purchasing power by providing a list of retailers and manufacturers you can contact for information on where to find this month's merchandise. To buy the apparel and equipment shown on pages 20,26,106-107 and 157, check the listings below to find the stores nearest you.
You'd better get used to the ''beep, beep, beep'' of pagers, because the electronics industry is predicting that the number of Americans who use them will go from 18 million today to more than 53 million by 1997. No, they won't all be doctors, lawyers and salesmen; with new wireless communications technology, everyone stands to benefit from a beeper. Instead of just displaying a caller's phone number, for example, some pagers receive voice mail or text messages. There are also watches, cellular phones and computers with paging technology, as well as beepers equipped to receive stock reports, sports scores and news updates from electronic mail services. Someday soon, you'll even be able to tune into your TV to see who's calling.
The Courting Of Molly Swenson--The Welcome Wagon Ski Team Needed One Real Woman To Lead Them To Victory. But Could They Afford The Price Of Glory?--Fiction By Ray Dean Mize