Seaside Venuses by Pearl Frush

Here is a rare nude from Pearl Frush, one of America's top female pin-up artists.  It was probably painted around 1940.

Peal Frush was born in Iowa but her family moved to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi when she was small. She travelled to New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia to study art.  Her main training came at the Chicago Art Institute, however.  

She opened her first studio in Chicago in the early forties and by the fifties was a top female pin-up artist working for calendar companies such as Gerlach-Barlow and Brown & Bigelow.  This picture is from Gerlach-Barlow's Aquatour series calendar from 1947; a best seller in its time.

She worked mainly in watercolour and gouache and her paintings have a very polished quality.  Not surprisingly many of her girls were to be found at the beach in their swimsuits.  

Her backgrounds were often painted as deliberately out of focus, not just to emphasise the figure but also to fool the eye in to thinking that they were possibly photographs.

Outside of her painting Frush was a sporty sort of woman enjoying tennis, sailing swimming and canoeing.  It's not surprising therefore that her pin-ups exude a sort of healthy, outdoorsy quality. 

Although she did do some boudoir style work it is these sorts of images for which she was best known.

Unlike Elvgren's hopelessly impractical girls who can't undertake the most basic of activities without flashing their underwear Frush's women look perfectly capable of changing the tyre on their cars on their own if they had a puncture on the way to the beach.

Her girls are perfectly wholesome and exude none of the slutty gold-digger sexiness of Vargas' girls.

They really were, in a pre-Playboy world, the epitome of the girl next door; provided the girl next door to you was really pretty and had killer legs.

Centrefold Venus of the Month 2: August - Myrna Weber

From August 1958 we bring you spectacular redhead Myrna Weber, looking edible in a feature called Playmate on a Picnic.  Myrna is an Irish Gaelic name meaning "beloved".

The picture of, then just 19 year old, Myrna (although Fifties make-up makes her look older) was taken by photographer Bunny (real first names Linnea Elenor) Yeager (b. 1930) in Florida.

The story behind the pictorial was that Myrna was on a picnic, so we have a picture of her getting ready to set off to the beach.

When she gets there she obviously decides to strip off and go skinny dipping, although whether this is before the picnic or after is never made clear!

Myrna hardly reveals anything to the camera, even by the standards Playboy in the nineteen fifties.  Other pictures taken during the shoot are no different  and it is only in a couple, including this one, which didn't appear in the magazine, where she reveals a little glimpse of her nipple.

Here she is on the beach bo doubt tuning in to some hip and groovy rock and roll.

This is the most revealing shot she posed for in a series of rather nice interior studies.  The pictures in the magazine being mainly exterior shots.

This small colour shot appeard in the magazine some years later  but gives us the colour scheme for this sequence.

Finally, we have a few more colour shots of Myrna which appeared in the magazine on different occasions.

This was Myrna's Playmate review shot from the January 1959 issue.

Bunny Yeager clicks for the camera

Former glamour model Yeager had, of course, previously photographed cult model Bettie Page and had been instrumental in bringing her to the attention of Hugh Hefner who made her Playmate of the Month for January 1954.

Yeager was also famous for photographing the iconic shots of Ursula Andress from the Jamaican beach set of Dr No (1962).

Playboy photographers at the time worked to a strict artistic brief from Playboy HQ in Chicago. Yeager was told to produce a centrefold picture with a camp fire in the foreground against a sea reflecting a sunset. Now Yeager was based in Miami where the sea is to the east of the beach so had to drive across the whole of Florida to the Gulf of Mexico coast to find her west facing beach to enable her to catch the sunset.

Centrefold Venus of the Month 1: July - Yvette Vickers

A hip cat

From 50 years ago comes Yvette Vickers in a centrefold pose considered so risque at the time that Hugh Hefner's lawyers tried to talk him out of publishing it.

Fortunately for us, Hefner took no notice of them and Yvette appeared as Playmate in the July 1958 issue.

At this time in Playboy the only coloured photograph in the Playmate pictorial was the centrefold itself.

Indeed, it was the only nude picture as well, the other photographs being there to illustrate the Playmate's girl next door life.

Someone has posted a comment saying that they are the gentleman second from the right in this phorograph, next to the lovely Yvette herself.

Triple P always likes these "normal life" photographs as it reinforces part of the real strength of featuring real girls rather than models.  Anyway, even if they were models or dancers it's nice to see them as you might have seen them on the street.  It somehow makes their decision to take their clothes off for us that much more precious, in some way.  This is particularly true of the fifties girls when this sort of thing was much more unusual and daring.

The picture, photographed by exploitation film director Russ Meyer, and accompanying article were part of Playboy's conscious attempt to court the "beat generation".

Yvette with Paul Newman in Hud

Yvette, already a minor actress, rode the fame her centrefold generated and went on to be a reasonably successful B-movie and TV actress, although much of her part in the Paul Newman film Hud (1963) was cut as Newman's wife Joanne Woodward, didn't like the look of the all too apparent on-screen chemistry.

Flattened by the 5o foot tall woman

One of her most famous films was Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) where her character was killed by the eponymous monster female.

She modelled for other men's magazines at the time as well. More recently she made a jazz record and appeared on the cult film convention circuit.

Agent Triple P thinks her centrefold is one of the finest from the 1950's and it is interesting to see that this alternative pose has nothing like the slutty abandonment of the chosen image

American Venus: Elizabeth Ann Roberts

Miss January 1958

Twenty-one years after the death of Chabas another furore erupted in Chicago regarding public decency. Hugh Hefner had been publishing Playboy there for just over four years and the authorities had constantly tried to stop him. His Playmate of the Month for January 1958 gave them another chance to have a go at him.

Elizabeth as college girl

Rather naively, Playboy though that because a mother gave permission for her daughter to pose and because she accompanied her to the photo session no-one would care that college girl Elizabeth Ann Roberts was only 17 at the time (some even say 16 -it does look like her mother claimed she was 18). Her pictorial's title of "Schoolmate playmate" probably didn't help.

She does look pretty young

As a result both Playboy and her mother were charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Now, one of these is art and one of these is a teenage girl with a nice arse

Hefner planned to defend himself using the fact that the model for September Morn by Chabas was also a young girl (possibly only 15, as we have seen in our previous entry).

It sounds perilously close to the "it's art therefore it's permissable" defence. In this case we are not sure how well it would have worked.

In the end he didn't get the chance as the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Playboy had learned its lesson, however, and immediately insisted all its models had to be 18 years or over from then on.

Elizabeth looks pensive. Not quite sure what her mother was thinking but it probably had dollar signs in it somewhere

Would you like to twiddle my knobs?