Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Equine Venus: Elke Sommer


We haven't had a Lady Godiva-type Venus on horseback for a while so here, from 1970, is German actress Elke Sommer. Elke turns 70 this November and deserves proper treatment in another post so we will return to her in the future.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

April Venus: Barbara Hillary

Barbara Hillary April 1970

For the next 12 months we will be looking back over the Playboy centrefolds since the beginning and selecting one as the ultimate picture to represent each month. This will be entirely subjective but we will be considering, face, figure, pose, sensuality and the overall composition of the picture. Its not about the girl really. If she has great photos in the rest of her pictorial but a dull centrefold she won't qualify. Playboy photographers are constrained, of course, by the fact that the have a long narrow image space. Therefore most Playboy centrefolds are depicted either full-length standing up or full length lying down. Sometimes they do crop the figure (usually to mid-thigh) or get the girl to adopt a kneeling pose; but these are unusual.

For April we have 60 centrefolds to consider and we very quickly got it down to the last four and then eliminated from there.


Ashlyn Martin April 1964


Ashlyn Martin nearly made it for her enticing smile and Boucher-esque pose in a nice uncluttered picture. Probably our runner-up.


Giuliana Marino April 2007


Despite saying its not about the girl Giuliana Marino was close for being the almost perfect incarnation of a Triple P woman. If we had to invent the perfect girl she would look almost exactly like Giuliana and...she's Italian! Her picture, because of the furniture, reminds us of happy days staying in the Grand Hotel in Rome where an assortment of Italian lovelies wafted through our suite and our life. If she hadn't been waxed she may have won!

Lisa Sohn April 1977


Lisa Sohn nearly made it on sensuality alone. Dripping wet, she exudes a sexiness that is rather unusual in a Playboy centrefold picture.

But, when it came down to it there was only one winner and that was Barbara Hillary from April 1970. It is, in fact, one of the great Playboy centrefold pictures (maybe even the greatest), photographed by Pompeo Posar. Barbara, her 37-24-35 figure stretched out on a beanbag, looks enticingly like an oyster presented in its shell. The vibrant coloured carpet frames her beautifully. The picture below from the same session is also splendid without having the impact of the centrefold itself.

Delicious!


Would you like to swallow me whole?

Most popular Items: March 2010

Linda Lusardi. I never did nude modelling. Oh no.

Here are the most popular searched items for March (last month's ranking in brackets).

1 (2) Pubic Wars. Back to number one.
2 (-) Linda Lusardi. Straight in at number 2.
3 (3) Louann Fernald. Third for the third month in a row.
4 (1) Elizabeth Ann Roberts. A slight drop for teenage Playmate.
5 (4) Sue and Louise Elvin. Mother and daughter still showing strongly.
6 (9) Alenka Bikar. Climb to top five for sprinter with the mobile posterior.
7 (11) Melodye Prentiss. Just outside the top five for regular favourite.
8 (8) Lani Todd. Best showing for contemporary (ish) Playmate.
9 (10) Polynesian Girls. Up again for island dream girls
10 (17) Veronika Zemanova. Back up for bouncing Czech.
11 (5) Gloria Root. Down for sixties Playmate.
12 (14) Evelyn Treacher. Most popular Penthouse Pet.
13 (-) Victoria Pendleton. Iron-thighed cyclist pedals back into top 20.
14 (-) Stephanie McLean. Back up for the late Barry Sheene's girlfriend.
15 (-) Marie Louise O'Murphy. Boucher's coquettish model.
16 (12) Ulla Lindstrom. The Sun's first Page 3 girl stays in top 20.
17 (4) Hyapatia Lee. Back down for part Native American porn star.
18 (6) Claire Rambeau. Down but not out for Playboy beauty.
19 (-) Lane Coyle. Labia flashing Pet from the mid-Seventies.
20 (-) Susan Waide. Another pussy flashing Pet.


The top ten artistic searches were:
1 (2) Marie Louise O'Murphy. Boucher's girl reigns supreme.
2 (1) Flaming June. Victorian masterpiece drops a place.
3 (5) Mario Tauzin. Into top 3 for French artist.
4 (8) September Morn. Back up for Chabas'nymphet.
5 (7) Ariadne asleep on the Island of Naxos by John Vanderlyn. Seminal American nude.
6 (-) John Collier Lady Godiva. Back into top ten for horsey Anglo Saxon.
7 (-) Goyo Hashiguchi. Tasteful prints from Japan.
8 (-) David Hamilton. Arty French-based photographer not the annoying disc jockey.
9 (10) Syrinx by Arthur Hacker. Victorian girlie in the reeds.
10 (-) Lady Godiva. Girl/horse interaction in the best possible taste.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 7-1975 part 2



Penthouse's Pet for July, English schoolgirl Jane Hargrave, was photographed by Bob Guccione in such a diffuse way that in many photos she was almost invisible. The cover picture being the only one where you could work out what you were actually looking at.  This was a shame, as Jane was a spectacularly beautiful girl, but fortunately she would reappear in the magazine again.


Disappearing in the mist


After some of the barrier breaking issues of recent months Penthouse's July edition was rather conservative.  There was more soft-focus in Jeff Dunas girl/girl set The Castaways which did, however, contain the first picture in the magazine of a girl touching another's pubic hair.




The final pictorial, by Geoff Howes in his second and final Penthouse pictorial, was of the delicate looking Sissy Stanley who had this one dreamy pussy touching shot.




Artistic decisions aside (they never went quite so soft-focus with their Pet of the Month again), Penthouse was doing well and seeing a continuing rise in circulation, although their claims of a global circulation of over 5 million may have been a bit optimistic.


If only the finances had been as transparent


Over at Playboy things were not nearly as happy. Over the years they had poured millions of dollars into clubs, records, hotels, movies and books. Almost none of these ventures made any money. The Playboy Clubs were increasingly finding themselves in what had become undesirable city centre locations. Many had to be closed down and re-located to more salubrious suburban areas.


The casino at the London Playboy Club

The Playboy clubs overall would have made a loss if it hadn't been for the $3.3 million a year profit Victor Lownes was producing from the London operation. Concerns about press stories relating to allegations (probably spurious) of hard drug use in the Playboy mansion were causing advertisers and subscribers to withdraw. The year-end figures for 1974 showed a worrying 48% drop in profits. By the time the report on the second quarter of 1975 came out Playboy was actually posting a loss of $356,000. The loss for the third quarter was up to $387,000.


 Lynn licks


Playboy was still under the impression that the only way to stop the slide was by keeping up with Penthouse and its numerous other competitors (there were now almost 40 nationally distributed mens' magazines on sale in the US by now).  It was probably no coincidence that Playboy was noticeably visually more explicit in the second half of 1975. July's Playmate Lynn Schiller, for example, sat with her legs apart licking who knows what off her fingers.


Lynn Schiller keeps her end up


Lynn also became the first Playboy Playmate to flash her anus in the magazine, in this two page spread.


 
 
In another pictorial on "legs" in the same issue this young lady is clearly displaying her perineum as well. Playboy seemed to be actually anticipating the trend that the arsehole was going to be the new pussy.




One of the other things that was eating Playboy's money was their attempt to out Penthouse Penthouse, their sister magazine Oui.


A young and lovely Helen Mirren


Although it contained a lot of European-themed news items (such as a faintly incredulous (and rather envious) little piece on the fact that British newspapers were featuring topless women on their pages) and European sourced pictorials from French partner Lui, it was actually less visually explicit than Playboy at this point. The July issue also saw a small but racy picture in their news section of up and coming British actress Helen Mirren.




However, they were also just starting to feature faux masturbation pictures such as this double spread in the July issue of "Diana".  Many of her pictures were of her caressing herself but this one, with its naughtily extended finger, was the most explicit.




Hustler  had been struggling financially in its first year to the extent that Larry Flynt was about to pull the plug on it. They were constantly looking around for pictorials with a gimmick factor.




In February that year they had shown a pictorial which purported to show the first pubic curls appearing on an adolescent girl's mound.  Encouraged by the positive response from their readers they brought the girl back for another pictorial entitled The Farmer's Daughter.  Hustler would not have risked a genuinely young girl, of course, so they managed to locate one who looked younger than she was.  The whole thing smacked of desperation.




Penthouse's August cover continued their recent trend for full-on topless pictures which most of their rivals were not yet being bold enough to follow.


 Marsha in 1975


Their first pictorial featured a somewhat arty selection of photographs by Czechoslovakian born photographer Gernot Plitz whose first work had appeared in Penthouse exactly two years earlier.  Plitz was raised in a concentration camp during World War 2 and was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as well as a member of a rock band. It was in Munich where he met his future wife, Marsha Middleton, during the 1972 Olympics. They subsequently set up a photographic studio in Sunset Strip producing portraits of rock stars, pictorials for Penthouse, Viva, Omni, Oui and Time as well as corporate clients. It is Marsha who features in the photographs in this pictorial  including this assertive knicker delving one (above).


Marsha today


Marsha now calls her self Amarushka and describes herself as an Elven Fairy High Priestess who researches and writes on alternative lifestyles, free energy technologies, archaeology, sacred sites and advanced healing arts.




Pet of the Month Marguerite Cordier's pictorial, also shot by Bob Guccione, had a number of spread legs shots but the dreamily erotic one above took their  faux masturbation shots to a new level of explicitness.




The final pictorial that month was a photo feature on the making of an erotic film which included this double page, er, spread.  None of the six girl/girl pictorials that had been in the magazine since December 1970 had had a shot anything like as graphic as this cunnilingus picture.




August's issue featured Playboy's most explicit cover so far with that month's  Norwegian Playmate, Lillian
Müller, photographed by Suze Randall wearing very little indeed.




Inside Suze had Lillian posing for an aggressively self-caressing faux masturbation shot which would certainly have looked at home in Penthouse.  Interestingly, Lillian's centrefold was shot by a different photographer, Dwight Hooker.  This happened occasionally but not often.  Perhaps Playboy felt that, the relatively new on the scene, Randall wasn't yet ready for the responsibility of the large format gatefold yet.


Kim's racy pose for Posar


Talking of experienced gatefold photographers, this issue also carried a pictorial on Playboy books editor Kim Komar. She had been working on a new Playboy book on photographer Pompeo Posar and he had persuaded her to pose. However, if she had been hoping for a few tasteful nudes she was in for something of a surprise. In one photograph she has a curly telephone handset cord between her legs and in the picture above she is showing as much as most Penthouse girls of the day.




August's Oui (incidentally the publishers always capitalised it as OUI) carried on with its gradual move to more visually explicit material.

Kathy touches



This issue had two of its models idly toying with their pussies in a keep up with Penthouse way. Kathy McKinnon (above top) leaving little doubt as to the sexual intent of her self-touching and whilst Marianne (above bottom) is not quite so full on, her index finger does appear to be right on the button.




The sexiest pictorial in the August issue of Oui was of British actress Jane Birkin undergoing some light bondage, as in this extraordinarily effective picture above.




The big splash in August, however, came from Hustler, which was desperately looking around for its salvation.  They found it in New York.  Earlier in the year the New York based Screw magazine, run by Larry Flynt's  friend Al Goldstein, had published some blurred paparazzi photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis doing some nude sunbathing. Goldstein had set up Screw in New York in 1968 as a weekly tabloid. Flynt saw how well the pictures had done in New York and now wanted to take them national. Flynt paid $18,000 to acquire five of these photographs and put them in the August issue of his magazine.


Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis saves porn magazine shock!


The ploy worked. He sold over 1 million copies that month, created a national profile for Hustler and saved the magazine financially.




The cover of September's Playboy featured the pert derriere of Amy Arnold, photographed by Philip Dixon.  That month's Playmate pictorial of Mesina Miller, was the second in a row photographed by Suze Randall.  However, the black and white pictures in the feature were by the veteran team of Bill and Mel Figge.




One of these monochrome shots appears to feature Miss Miller's perineum as she struggled to fit herself into a hip bath.  Playboy was getting very close to showcasing their girl's anuses.




More focus on the rear end came in this picture from a feature on legs, which also followed the trend of using the increasingly prevalent lesbian theme.




However, the biggest erotic charge in Playboy that month came from a clever reverse striptease pictorial by Richard Fegley. Entitled Put it on, put it on it showed a striking redhead getting dressed with the maximum amount of writhing and spread leg shots possible.




Our heroine shows just as much pussy as any of Guccione's girls up until that point. Not only that, but she has her hand between her legs in Playboy's strongest faux frigging shots so far.




One picture in the set was so strong that Playboy has subsequently censored it, removing the probing fingers from the current version. Above top, we have the current incarnation of this photograph and can see by comparing it to the original (above, below) how the probing fingers have been airbrushed out.




Penthouse for September dialled back on the pussy touching apart from one shot of Pet of the Month Michelle Stevens (below).




Michelle's Pet of the Month pictorial, photographed by Jeff Dunas, carried on the very soft focus look of the third quarter on 1975 in Penthouse.




Despite the fuzzy pictures, in several of her photos Michelle is clearly flashing her bits, however indistinctly, and more times than the previous Pets.




That month's issue saw Penthouse doing another boy/girl set, Mountain Retreat, photographed by Earl Miller.  Continuing the trend of makng each set slightly more explicit than the last this one had, for the first time, the man with his hand very close to the most intimate part of the girl's anatomy and actually touching her pubic hair.




In addition, the pictorial featured the clearest depiction yet of the man's penis, making only its third appearance in one of the magazine's "love sets". 

Next time we will look at the final quarter of 1975 which saw some activity which had a profound effect on the future of the Pubic Wars.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 7-1975 part 1

The usual January Playmate review cover had the usual amount of fur. It would be the rather sinister Playboy rabbit's penultimate outing on the cover


1975 would be the last official year of the Pubic Wars between Penthouse and Playboy although, as we shall see, the battle actually dragged on for several more years.




I've got all this and you haven't! Hefner shows off. Tony Curtis looks on in admiration


Playboy started the year quietly with the January issue using much of its pictorial pages for a breathless 14 page photo essay on Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion West in Los Angeles. By this time he had virtually given up on his original mansion in chilly Chicago, preferring the all round sun and Hollywood lifestyle of Los Angeles. The article gave the impression of a sybaritic life of excess, naked women, group sex and film stars. Which is exactly what it was like.




Playmate of the Month Lynnda Kimball gave us this sensual pose in her centrefold pictorial.  Her carefully placed hand just draws attention to her hidden groin.




The annual Playmate review had Miss September 1974, Kristine Hansen, with her thighs slightly apart and displaying her labia, nestled in her golden curls




Gallery had originally began as an almost exact copy of Playboy.  It would have been expected, therefore, that they would have copied Playboy as regards the explicitness of their visual approach.  Their January cover, hoever, showed that they were starting to move more in the Penthouse direction.  A trend that would continue during the year.




Hustler, meanwhile was going for a subtle Penthouse type approach for its January cover, although 1975 would see it move away from copying Guccione's magazine to something raunchier and more distinctive.




Penthouse was also less assertive than it had been with its Pet for January, Juliet Morris, who was also showing less than some of the previous year's bolder Pets.





Nonetheless, there was this large pussy touching picture spread across two pages and the slightly more explicit one below where Miss Morris' labia are just about visible.





The UK edition, which had been censoring or omitting the more extreme beaver shots did show those where Juliet was (just about) flashing her bits.  Increasingly, however, they were using different Pets from the US edition.





The January UK edition, for example, had a Pet who never appeared in the US edition, Joanna Steele, who didn't flash her bits but is notable for giving Penthouse its very first knickers-up-the-crack photo.




Oui carried on with it's habit of using former Playboy Playmates on the cover.  For January we get May 1967's Anne Randall in a see-through dress.




Oui featured another celebrity couple in the forms of I Spy actor Robert Culp and his lissome wife Susan.  Unlike Jean-Claude Killy, the previous year, however, Culp bravely flashed his penis in his pictorial.




An article on aphrodisiacs had another photograph where the male model was showing his penis but this was an even clearer shot than Mr Culp's example.  Even more racily, the lady has her leg actually pressed against the man's prick.  All these male members continued to be controversial with the readers, however.





The thrust (so to speak) of most of the objections being that looking at penises was gay or might make them gay.  They would, no doubt, have been much happier with the gentle pussy caressing of that month's centrefold, Alicia.  She looked nicely abandoned with her dishevelled stockings and relaxed looking pose.  Such explicit pussy touching was new for Oui.




For February, Playboy ran a pictorial on Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace in the slot usually reserved for a Hollywood starlet. 


Linda Lovelace enjoys her body


The fact that she was well known enough to merit a feature demonstrated how America's  (or at least a significant minority of the population) attitude to hard core pornography had changed.  A change that was one of the drirving forces of the Pubic Wars.




Indeed, Genesis had put another porn superstar, Marilyn Chambers, on the cover in January along with a feature covering other hard core stars of the moment.


Laura Misch looks all innocent


Playboy's centrefold, Laura Misch, modelled a fetching, not quite see through, outfit. This ploy would become increasingly popular with Playboy over the years as they wanted to get their girls to sprawl about invitingly with their legs apart without actually getting them to show too much. Laura later went on to work in newspapers and have a novel, Carry me Back, published (as Laura Watt) in 1997.


Everybody ought to have a maid
 

Elsewhere in the magazine, Playboy ran another of their increasingly frequent couples pictorials which, as part of their "sexing up" policy. Penthouse had first run a pictorial like this at the end of 1972 and again the following year but Playboy was now following suit, along the lines of those in Oui.  The Playboy pictorial, photographed by Richard Fegley, was called The French Maid and was about...a French maid. It was all very tasteful but was very much like a Penthouse couples pictorial.




Penthouse went one better that month by having a pictorial featuring two girls and a man. Their feature Three in Love was altogether racier and featured glimpses of something Playboy hadn't dared show in its pictorials so far, a penis and some strong implied fellatio.




Penthouse's centrefold for February was a rare, for them, ethnic Pet: the part Filipina Lona Simpson.  Penthouse actually published a letter, a couple of months later, asking why they didn't have more ethnic Pets.  They didn't give an answer.




The beautiful Lona appeared in several shots where she was displaying her labia.  In this one her pussy has been illuminated to draw special attention to it, whilst her face remains in shadow.


Lona rides astride


Her pose astride a chair was, when shown the following month in Britain, the first time the UK edition had shown a Pet's labia, without censoring the picture, as they had been doing up until this point.


Pamela in the grass


The third pictorial in the February issue of Penthouse featured a young lady named Pamela Martin whose clitoral hood was clearly visible in one picture.  Penthouse started to publish appreciative letters from readers supporting their depiction of the girls' labia.  Interestingly one or two started to come in asking for anuses as well.  Whether these were real letters or were written by the editorial team to support the direction the magazine was taking in the Pubic Wars is not known.


Club's first issue, February 1975


February saw a new entrant into the mens' magazine market in the US and a new participant in the Pubic Wars.  British  publisher Paul Raymond launched Club in the US in February 1975.  Like Larry Flynt he had originally started out in strip shows or, as he had to originally, shows featuring nude but immobile ladies; as it was only legal to have naked ladies on stage in the UK provided they didn't move!  To make these tableaux more interesting he often winched the ladies across the stage using a variety of devices to make them "move"!


Paul Raymond in the Revuebar, 1972


He later discovered a loophole to this bizarre law in that it did not apply to private clubs, so he launched the Raymond Revuebar in London in 1958.  He copied the Playboy Bunny uniforms, much to Hugh Hefner's annoyance. Using the profits from his clubs he started his own mens' magazine, King, in 1964, although it was not a success and he eventually sold it again to a celebrity consortium that included actor Peter Sellers, director Brian Forbes and TV star David Frost.  Eventually King was bought by Raymond's arch rival Mayfair magaxine which Raymond later, in turn, acquired.


Raymond and his bunny girls check out his new magazine in 1964


It wasn't until 1971 that he tried again in the magazine market.  He bought the venerable pre-war publication Men Only and turned it into a Penthouse clone.


Paul Raymond's first Men Only, June 1971


Appearing in June 1971, just a few months after Penthouse had gone pubic with a couple of pictures of Stephanie McLean, Raymond put down a marker by having a dozen pubic pictures in his first issue.  Penthouse would gingerly move forward with only four or five for the rest of the year.


The first issue of Club International in the UK


The following year, in September 1972, Raymond launched a brand new magazine, Club International, in the UK.  This would follow Club into the US market as well, in December 1976.  Confusingly, Club in the US used material from Men Only in the UK whereas Club International used material from, er, Club International.  So, like Bob Guccione before him, Raymond had plenty of material already for his new Ameican magazine.  Before long Club and Club International would move into fourth and fifth spots behind Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, circulation wise.  They had many more girl pictorials, however, and much less literary pretensions than Penthouse and Playboy.




February's Oui featured future Dallas star Deborah Shelton in a boudoir style Penthouse-like cover shot.




February's couples pictorial in Oui was less about trying to build an atmosphere of authentic passion and was more of a "comedy" approach; never a successful combination, although it wouldn't stop Oui persisting with this approach for a number of years.




For the centrefold girl Oui experimented by including two very small groin shots but they were nowhere near as racy as what Penthouse was doing.




Finally, Oui seemed to be jumping on the Penthouse-led self-caressing bandwagon with this picture of Vanessa from the last pictorial in that issue.




March's Playboy had a clever cover which trailed a pictorial inside called Ripped-Off which got seven photographers to handle this particular theme.




This effort, by Garrick Peterson, had more passion than most of Playboy's couples material and also featured a rarity for them, male pubic hair. 




March's cover featured Pet Susan Ryder who, after a wash of soft focus pictures earlier in her pictorial, came into clear focus for a full page picture where, coolly gazing at the lens she clearly reveals everything for the first time in Penthouse. (For more of Susan see her full pictorial here)


Susan displays all




Larry Flynt reacted to Susan's pussy picture in his editorial in the May issue of Hustler.  "If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, I definitely feel flattered after reviewing the March issue of Penthouse. The open beaver shot on page 77 (the one of Susan above) is the first admission by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione that Penthouse has been playing second fiddle to HUSTLER for quite some time. When I started HUSTLER one year ago, I expected a reaction from Guccione long before now. Especially when you consider the fact that he has never had an original idea of his own. However, I commend Mr. Guccione for his decisive action, at least it indicates that he has balls, but it is going to take more than balls to keep up with HUSTLER. He will need a few brains as well, an asset that he has failed to demonstrate very well." 


Rite of Spring from March 1975

Meanwhile, back in the March issue of Penthouse also had another of its pictorials featuring two girls; something they had first done back in 1970 with the unimaginatively titled Two Women. Photographed by Earl Miller in Penthouse's dreamy, super soft focus style the pictures were romantic rather than particularly sexual.  Penthouse was being much less visually explicit with its two girl sets than with its Pets and models, obviously thinking that the concept of portraying two women together was naughty enough of itself, without having to show their bits.





March's Oui had a rather curious pictorial with accompaniong text written in the style of Winnie the Pooh.  We're surprised they weren't sued by the estate of AA Milne.  This opening page shows the girl with her dolly but in complete contrast to this child like scene she is displaying the first really clear labia in Oui.



It was still about posing ecstatically whilst appearing to pleasure yourself for Oui's models as well, as demonstrated by Vicky.


Streubel on a chair in 1975

The final girl in that month's issue was Brigitte Streubel, who gave us this potently erotic pose.  Streubel is a German model (from 1969 until 1976), poet and latterly actress, film camera operator and yoga teacher.  She is part of The Harem a sort of arty/philosophical commune of five women and one man (!) who live in Munich.


Streubel on a chair today




April saw Cavalier join the ranks of magazines bold enough to get their cover girls to flash their nipples on the newsstands (although some were now insisting on covers or wrapping for the increasingly explicit examples).




Penthouse was equally upfront that month with Judy Clayton displaying her nipples for their first topless cover of the year (by Jeff Dunas) and the most brazen they had ever done. No concealing strands of hair, profile views or partly clothed breasts here.


Signe grabs it

Pet of the Month Signe Berger was photographed by Earl Miller in Penthouse's raunchiest faux masturbation shot so far; clutching her groin in ectasy. Signe would later go on to be one of the Penthouse Pets Bob Guccione took to Rome at the end of 1976 to shoot the additional hardcore footage he felt the film needed. 


Signe is on the left with Penthouse model Henrietta Kellog (who appeared in the magazine as Rhiana Post in August 1976)


During her short time in Rome she had an affair with Guccione's assistant.  She is visible in the Imperial bordello orgy scene indulging in some graphic fellatio.




The increasing use of the implied masturbation shot wasn't just confined to the likes of Penthouse and Hustler however.  Gallery had always firmly modelled itself on Playboy, with an equivalent level of explicitness.  Just as Playboy was starting to get more explicit in its war with Penthouse, however, so Gallery had to up the stakes as well.




Their young lady from the April edition, Alix, is photographed in arched-backed ecstasy by Fred Enke, who would also lens some of the most explicit shots for Paul Raymond's magazines in the UK  which would then also appear in his US publications.




In fact Enke was in action with several pictorials appearing in the third issue of Club to hit the newsstands, in April.




His photos of the beautiful Chris contain some tasteful labia revealing shots and she like Flora (below), who he also photographed for this issue, also appeared in a see-through leotard.   In fact the two leotards look identical so they could have been the same one!






The see-through outfit gave an extra tease factor to Flora's effective self-caressing pictures in that issue.




Playboy's March 1973 Playmate Cyndi Wood kept her top on the cover but her suggestive pose with a bottle of Champagne showed that Playboy hadn't given up the battle yet.


From Bed and Board. Picture by Ken Marcus

Inside, the suggestiveness continued with a pictorial on sexy food including this couple being naughty with grapes and oysters.




The gorgeous but ultimately tragic figure of Carole Augustine graced the cover of April's Oui although she didn't appear inside the magazine, which was an annoying habit of Oui's.


Michael and Karen get friendly


Another real-life couple featured in that month's boy/girl set,  although we have to confess that we had not heard of the actor Michael Callan.  Subsequent research, however, has shown that he appeared in one of Triple P's favourite Ray Harryhausen films, Mysterious Island (1961), with the lovely Beth Rogan


Michael Callan and Beth Rogan in Mysterious Island


He was also in Cat Ballou (1965).  Starting as a Broadway dancer/actor he was in the original run of West Side Story but missed out on the movie due to contractual problems.  He was forty at the time of this pictorial and the lady who was described in the text as his "friend Karen" was a minor actress called Karen Malouf who he eventually married (she was his third wife).  She looks  a lot younger than he does.  He flashes his cock even more than Robert Culp did, which won't have gone down well with some of the readers!




That month's centrefold, Elena, is shown touching herself as Oui starts to copy the Penthouse faux masturbation trend in earnest.

  


Penthouse's May issue continued to gently at push the boundaries having another fully bare breasted cover.


Ava spreads


Inside, Ava Gallay, the Pet of the Month, was photographed in the, still rare, legs spread, pussy-revealing from the rear pose, in full-on soft-focus mode by Jeff Dunas.




Another boy/girl set, this time from Geoffrey Rian (an alias for Jeff Dunas which he used when he already had another pictorial in the magazine), appeared in this issue called On the Beach.  This was another first in that the girl was actually shown with her finger in contact with the man's penis. Playboy never showed a penis in any of their couples pictorials although they had no compunction about showing full frontal pictures of actors in their annual Sex in Cinema features.









Octavia indulges in some serious pussy play


The third pictorial featured a lady under the name of Octavia Cornell, whose pictorial is noteworthy for several reasons.  Firstly, she was shown in a series of photographs rolling around on a bed with her hand firmly on her pussy in the most sustained faux masturbation shots in the magazine so far.


Photographer Gernot Plitz captures Octavia's arsehole


In addition, there was this full-page mirror shot which meant that Octavia was the first girl in Penthouse to clearly show her anus, thus satisfying a gentleman from Quebec who had written in some months earlier requesting just this.


Lori has her hair done for Caligula


Lori Wagner (left) gets a touch up on the set of Caligula whilst Anneka Di Lorenzo (who would be Pet of the Month in October 1975) looks on


Octavia's real name was Lori Wagner and she was 22 years old when these pictures were taken.  A former beauty queen she was appearing on Broadway at the time.  She left a production of Let my People Come to fly to Rome to appear in Bob Guccione's Caligula.  She was one of only three Penthouse girls to work on the whole shoot.  Although other Pets appeared, they were mainly in the extra heardcore footage Guccione shot secretly in January 1977.


Lori (right) in the Temple of Venus scene


Lori was very visible in the Temple of Venus scene enthusiatically snogging her friend Anneka Di Lorenzo, who was Pet of the Month for October 1975.  This was a scene shot by original director Tinto Brass and wasn't one of the Guccione's extra scenes.


Lori with Caligula himself


She also got some visibility sat next to star Malcolm McDowell in a banquet scene.  Her character was Aggrippina and she had been told that it would be a speaking role but gradually the role got smaller and smaller as the shoot progressed.


Lori attacks Anneka in the famous lesbian scene in Caligula


However, it was two other scenes that would gain her worldwide notoriety, to the extent that when the film was actually released and she was doing publicity for it the bad response from critics helped drive her away from the public scene for years. 


Lori's arsehole makes another appearance in Caligula


Firstly, the notorious lesbian love scene with Anneka Di Lorenzo which was one of the "extra" scenes shot by Bob Guccione.  Highly touted at the time as the most explicit lesbian love scene in a generally released motion picture it was intercut with another sex scene between Helen Mirren, Malcom McDowell and Teresa Ann Savoy. Lori is seen giving cunnilingus to Anneka, being penetrated by Anneka's fingers and indulging in a sixty nine session.






Lori sprays


The second scene features Lori and Anneka again, in a scene where Proculus is killed.  Lori stands over his body, hikes up her dress and pees all over him whilst Anneka washes the blood off her hand in Lori's stream.  They made Lori drink enormous quantities of water for this scene and then made her wait three hours before filming.  It's no wonder it is such an impressive flow, therefore!


Lori (left) with Anneka in Messalina! Messalina!


In the interim between shooting and the film's release, because of Caligula's lengthy release delay, Lori and Anneka appeared in a cheap Italian exploitation film called Messalina! Messalina! (1977) whose sole purpose was to use some of the sets and costumes from Caligula to make some money in case the main film never saw the light of day (which looked likely at one point).  Lori came back in the nineties and made some more exploitation films before retiring in 1999.


Lori in Penthouse aged 38


When Penthouse featured the Caligula lesbian love scenes pictures again in February 1991 they photographed a new pictorial of Lori, at the age of 38 but still looking sensational.




Anyway, back to May 1975 and Playboy, meanwhile, was also jumping on the girl/girl bandwagon and presented this page from a pictorial about tee shirts. Whilst trying to evoke a playful, girls dorm sort of feeling the picture at the bottom of the page was easily as racy as anything Penthouse had done in this area at the time.


Girl on girl fun in May 1975


Furthermore, Playboy's Playmate that month, Bridget Rollins, presented readers with the magazine's largest split beaver picture to date, as she reclined across two pages her legs apart and not a hint of soft-focus to be seen.


Bridget reclines






Oui's progression in the faux masturbation approach was moving apace with May's Judy giving them their most explicit centrefold to date.




Club had Fred Enke, again, getting his model, in this case a ravishing creature going under the name of Debbie, to flash her bits.




The editions for the end of the first half of the year brought both the Playboy Playmate of the Year and the candidates for the Penthouse Pet of the Year. For Playboy, the outrageously busty Marilyn Lange appeared completely naked on the cover.




Marilyn twiddles


Inside, in a double page picture she playfully twists her pubic hair. Playboy had come a long way since the anxious meetings as to whether to show a hint of Liv Lindeland's curls or not four and a half years earlier.


Love the red boots!


An article on Sex in Cinema: French style which looked at all the erotic films coming out from that part of Europe gave Playboy another excuse for one of the increasingly popular lesbian shots.


Nina Carter on the cover of June's Oui

 

Playboy's sister magazine Oui had been designed to be a "European style" (for which read, racier) challenger for Penthouse.  It sourced many of its pictorials from its co-parent Lui, in France with added pictorials provided by the US team.




Oui had often featured couples sets; even more so than Penthouse at this time but they were relentlessly tasteful as this example from the June issue, purporting to show a pair of flying trapeze stars, shows.  Slightly naughtier than the Playboy equivalents eagle eyed readers could just see that the gentleman trapeze artist is flashing his penis in the picture at top right.


The incomparable Nina Carter


Oui had yet to go as extreme as Penthouse on its split beaver shots but they were now occasionally letting a hint of something through, as in this photograph of the gorgeous Nina Carter (later Mrs Rick Wakeman) by John Kelly, then the husband of Vivien Neves.




One other picture from the June issue showed where Oui was going.  Every month they included a painting by French artist Aslan who had been producing a pin-up girl a month (inevitably accompanied by a pretentious quote from a French writer) for Oui's French co-parent (with Playboy) magazine Lui since the sixties.  His June girl is obviously enjoying the friction from her black knickers in the most overtly sexual of the pictures he had produced so far.




An idea of what Oui and Playboy were competing with came in the June issue of Penthouse, which still had one eye on the increasingly successful but more explicit Hustler.  July's Pet, the far from enticingly named Wendy Blodgett was the third in a row to go completely topless for the cover. However, unlike her rather coy predecessors Wendy looks like she is squirming in ecstasy.




Inside, in her Pet pictorial, she was shown with both her hands between her legs; one from the front, one from the rear, mirroring Octavia Cornell's small shot in the May issue, except this was a full page picture.




Another of Penthouse's increasingly regular girl/girl pictorials, the second of what would be four in 1975, depicted rather more passion than previously.  Eschewing the usual wandering hand in hands in the woods  approach these two young ladies looked like they were actually having sex with each other.  The pictorial, The Friends, culminated with this two page spread of one girl pulling the succulent looking nipple of the others into her hungry mouth.




Also, in that month's issue was the annual Pet of the Year play-off. The candidates were all presented using pictures from their original pictorials. There was one exception. Anneka de Lorenzo had this full page, explicit spread legs picture which hadn't appeared in her original pictorial back in September 1973.

However, as Penthouse continued to push the barriers there were starting to be rumblings in the Playboy camp about the competition between the magazines. This was to come to a head in the second half of the year.