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.

Christmas Venus

A Happy Christmas (or whatever your equivalent may be) to all our readers.  We really appreciate those who come by and, especially, those who take the time to comment.  Your comments and, indeed, requests are always welcome!  When we started this blog a little over four years ago we never dreamed that it would approach the five million visits we are close to now!

Our Christmas girl is by French illustrator Aslan of whose work we will be presenting more in the New Year!

Venusian Venuses: NEL book covers from the seventies

Nice girlie images were a bit lacking in Agent Triple P's life in the early mid-seventies.  We were aware of our father's collection of Penthouse magazines but they were kept fairly inaccessibly in a cupboard in his study.  We enjoyed the bikini-clad girlies in the Sunday Express newspaper every week but they were, of course, in black and white (no colour pictures in UK newspapers then).

Richard Clifton-Dey

But our burgeoning appreciation of the female form was fed by the covers of many of the science fiction novels we enjoyed reading at this point.  We had just discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian and Venusian stories, thanks to new editions by New English Library which had striking covers by many of the top SF artists of the time.  Even more striking were some of the exotic ladies enticingly featured on the covers although, sadly, the contents of the stories were not, of course, as exciting as regards women as the covers promised!

This one, also by Richard Clifton-Dey (d. 1997) was our favourite.  She looks lean and athletic and not like the overblown Playboy-style Barbies you get in fantasy art these days.  With the top one what we liked was her Paco Rabanne style metal plate skirt which has an excellent peek-a-boo factor!

These pictures spurred on Triple P's first attempts to draw naked women using both these and Sunday Express bikini beauties as source material.  We started to put them on the covers of our school rough books and did them in coloured biro as we had one of those ten colour ballpoint pens.  Green skinned maidens were our favourite!

In the future we will look at the equivalent covers from the Martian series.  We still have the original books up in our loft somewhere but they aren't very accessible.  Maybe over Christmas we will try to get them down and produce better scans.  We will also look at the next generation of naked lovelies we enjoyed on book covers for John Norman's breathtakingly sexist Gor series.

Non-centrefold Venus of the Month 13: Derna Wylde, September1976

Although we had a Penthouse Non-Centrefold of the Month for August and, moreover, she was from the previous month in the same year, we have decided not to get stressed about this and just post whoever we want!  It's more important that we try to catch up over the next few months, having got hopelessly behind.  We would like, by March, to have got to the situation where we are posting girls from the appropriate month in the appropriate month!  Well, at least, that's what S from Vancouver tells us we have to do!

This young lady is one we remember from when the September 1976 issue of Penthouse came out.  We didn't have this issue but we remember someone bringing it into school.  It was the UK edition, of course, but the pictorials that month were the same, although the US edition was out a month later than the US one.  Most of our classmates preferred the voluptuous charms of Dawn Shaw, that month's centrefold (who, indeed, was lovely) but at the time we preferred the other two girls in that issue Derna Wylde and Sienna Welles.

Derna, Penthouse maintained (although by this point what they said about their models was usually a complete fabrication) was half Chinese and half American Indian (none of this Native American stuff back then).  Whether she really was or whether it was just because it was shot out in the American West, with the inclusion of a random Indian, we don't know.

Anyway, here is Derna wandering out of the woods in her cowboy boots and with her guitar.  It's these sorts of scene-setting pictures that made pictorials from this period so superior to what we get today.  It's really like the process of imagining what a pretty girl looks like naked.  There is no fun to be had in guessing if she is naked from the start!

Time for a quick strum and to unveil those lovely legs.  We remember the dreaded midi skirt from the seventies.  First introduced in 1970 (or rather reintroduced) the mid seventies version of the most unflattering skirt length in history was full, like Derna's example here.  At least the forties incarnation (the previous period it was in fashion) was cut tight to the hips and legs.

Here we get our first proper look at Derna with one of those bust squeezing shots that Penthouse loved so much.   We're not quite sure where the bucket came from, it wasn't on her backpack!

Getting the girls to touch their pussies had been a feature of the magazine for about a year so here Derna checks on her impressive bush.  One advantage of a midi skirt being, of course, that you don't need to wear knickers.

Underneath her red top Derna reveals our favourite garment on a woman: the white cotton vest.  Her perky bust produces a very pleasing effect here!

In this effective up-the-skirt photograph we can see that Derna does, indeed, seem to have some oriental blood although, of course, the ancestors of Native Americans came from Asia anyway.

In this one she has her hair up which is something that Agent Triple P appreciates on a young lady, especially if there are random wispy bits escaping from the formal arrangement.

Derna, as you can see from this picture, has very long hair indeed.  As to her other visible hair in this one she has straight pubic hair.  Triple P only has experience of three naked Chinese women and they all had straight pubic hair but whether this is a defining characteristic of oriental women we don't know.  Derna's labia are prominent enough to rise above her bush, anyway.

Now she is perfectly attired,  for Triple P anyway, in just her vest.  A wet vest at that!

This is the photograph which we particularly remember from when we first saw this pictorial over thirty-five years ago!  Completely splendid!

The summer of 1976 was very hot in Britain and at the end of the summer term at school some of us would sit near the fence that divided us from girls' school next door and try to encourage them to do cartwheels.  A couple of the naughtier girls (yes, C, we mean you) knew exactly what they were doing and cavorted to great effect.  A naked demonstration such as this, however, would have been too much for our system, we suspect!  We got excited enough just seeing their knickers and firm young thighs! Needless to stay, the school soon introduced a distance limit from the fence, beyond which we weren't allowed to go, to keep us from speaking (and watching!) the girls next door!  Spoil sports!

Finally naked, Derna puts her splendid body into a wonderfully sculptural  shape in the water.

This pictorial, was shot by Mindas, who was only credited with one other Penthouse pictorial, May 1976's Three's Company which we will be posting on The Seduction of Venus very soon.  Whether Mindas was the name of a particular photographer or an alias for one of Penthouse's regulars we don't know.

These final four pictures are photographed in a very different style from the others in the pictorial.  It's not clear if these were shot indoors or whether outdoors as all you can see is the ethnic blanket.  If he (or she!) was not working under an alias then it's shame that Penthouse didn't use him more as he produced some striking images in this pictorial.

Very much more soft-focus than the exterior shots they also have a strong, warm colour cast to them.

The only thing we would have liked to have seen from Derna is a smile!  She looks quite gloomy throughout the pictorial!  Still, one to bring back memories!

Centrefold Venus of the Month 40: Angela Dorian/Victoria Vetri, September 1967

September's centrefold girl is the beautiful Angela Dorian who appeared in Playboy's September 1967 issue.  I don't know what it is about girls in hammocks which is so appealing; there always seems to be the promise of illicit sex about them, although Triple P tried it once in Italy and it was far from satisfactory.  Perhaps it is something to do with the movement.  Anyway, Angela, photographed by Curt Gunther, looks completely irresistible in hers, although you would be hard pushed to get anyone else in there with her.

Look how splendidly uncluttered Playboy covers were in those days compared with the eye-numbing dogs' breakfasts of type that assail the reader these days.

Angela's first pictorial photograph is this fine portrait which shows what a very pretty face she had.  What do you mean you didn't notice her face?

Rather more than the usual girl next door by the time she posed for Playboy she had been acting for 5 years, having done a lot of TV.  In fact she had appeared in 26 shows up to that point including Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Perry Mason and Hogan's Heroes.

Angela in Hogan's Heroes (1967)

Agent Triple P remembers watching World War 2 prison camp comedy Hogan's Heroes when he was small.  From the look of this shot of Angela, in The Crittendon Plan episode, the costume department weren't worrying about nineteen forties period accuracy that much.  She looks completely sixties!  This episode was actually first broadcast in September 1967; when this issue of Playboy was on the newsstands.

Angela in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in 1966 with David McCallum as Ilya Kuryakin

With Robert Vaughan

Rather earlier than this was her appearance in post-Bond spy drama The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where she appeared in the episode called The Indian Affairs Affair playing a native American called Charisma Highcloud.

Her Indian costume did not look that authentic either but that was because she was playing  a dancer in a club.  Because of her dark, exotic looks she was often cast in ethnic roles.  Her father was a Sicilian and her mother was from Rome; both first generation immigrants.

Her first real cinematic role was as a Mayan girl in the Yul Brynner epic Kings of the Sun in 1963.  Here she is (right) with English actress Shirley Anne Field.  In this production she appeared under her real name of Victoria Vetri (credited Vettri in the film).  Angela Dorian was a stage  name chosen by her agent before her Playboy appearance, based on the name of  the Italian liner the Andrea Doria which sank a dozen years before.

Unlike many Playmates who went on to be actresses solely on the strength of their figures (see most Andy Sidaris films) Dorian could actually act and had a gift for light comedy.  Here she is with her Hollywood agents Arthur Kennard and Merrit Blake discussing a script.

One thing a girl in the sixties needed was very big lashes and here Angela lays it on like tarmacadam.

Playboy claimed that not only was she an actress but a jazz and ballet dancer, a singer, songwriter and guitarist and a graphic designer too.  What a busy girl.  No doubt she is arranging some assignment in her multi-faceted career here.

In fact, her career may have taken a more high profile path if she hadn't turned down the role of Lolita in 1962 which shot Sue Lyon to stardom.  She also just missed out on the role of Maria in the film of West Side Story (1961) and although she was offered the job of dubbing Natalie Wood's singing voice she turned that down too.

Angela was a keen car enthusiast, it seems, and even at the time of her Playboy pictorial owned a Porsche and an Austin-Healey Sprite.  So it seemed natural for Playboy to take her down to the Los Angeles Times car races at Riverside.

Here, in the background is World Champion Formula 1 driver Graham Hill, the only person to win the motor racing Triple Crown: the Le Mans 24 Hours, the Indianapolis 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix.  In 1929 Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy proposed the concept of Six Degrees of Separation whereby everyone on earth can be connected to everyone else in just six steps.  So here is Angela with Graham Hill who was a friend of Agent Triple P's uncle!

Angela attracts the admiring glances of another spectator

Here is Angela with a lucky friend strolling down Olvera Street in Los Angeles' "Little Mexico".  Agent Triple P has been  here, which is the oldest part of the city, very close to the architecturally splendid Union Station.

Angela shows off her dancing skills at the Cheetah club.  This was a new club in town, having opened in February 1967 at the Pacific Ocean Park Amusement Pier in Venice.  This is somewhere else Agent Triple P used to go with his local lady friend M when he used to travel to Santa Monica regularly, four to six years ago.  M was one of the few women who managed to get Triple P to dance!  Not at the Cheetah, though, as it closed some time between June 1968 and March 1969.

So does the lucky chap get to take Angela home?  We'll never know!  That was the last photo in Angela's September 1967 pictorial but never fear we have many more photos of her!

 Rod Taylor threatens to shoot Helena Chavez (Dorian) to stop her falling into the hands of the Indians

Publicity shots from Chuka (1967)

A couple of months after her Playboy pictorial came out Angela appeared in the Rod Taylor Western, Chuka.  The film performed disappointingly at the box office.  Angela played a Mexican girl.

We next saw Angela in Playboy in January 1968 when hers was one of the three previous years centrefolds featured on the cover.

Inside, Angela's Playmate Review picture was a marvel, with her twisting her extraordinary 5' 5" 36-21-35 body into a shape that displays both her breasts and bottom to superb effect.

Here are three more from the same set-up.  She really does have a tiny waist!

One more of her looking completely tigerlicious.

Miaow!

Talking of cats Angela appeared as the human form of a cat, Isis, in the 1968 Star Trek episode Assignment Earth.  Here she is with Teri Garr (left) later to star in another science fiction classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Talking of Star Trek, here she is with Leonard Nimoy in his post-Spock role on Mission Impossible.  Angela appeared in the 1970 episode Squeeze Play.

Angela in Batman

The month after her Playmate Review issue she appeared as Florence of Arabia (good grief!) in the Batman episode I'll be a Mummy's Uncle with the marvelous Victor Buono.

Let's go back to some more pictures from her Playmate of the Month shoot.  Here are a few more of her in the hammock which featured in her centrefold.  Whilst posing for these pictures the hammock gave way and Angela suffered two broken ribs.  You have to suffer for Art!

In this one we get a rare glimpse of Angela's fluff.  If it had been used in the magazine it would have been cropped, of course.  Pubic Playmates were still more than two years into the future.

More suspended furniture in this one as Angela pulls her body into another lovely shape.  

Here is another portrait from the session that produced the full length shot with the green cushions in her Playmate pictorial.

Next we have a number of her inside a house with large picture windows, which help give a natural light look to these indoor shots.  Angela appeared in the 1969 Playboy Playmate calendar as Miss June, using one of these shots.

Angela was  already a mother at the time these pictures were taken, not that you could guess from her shape.  Her son was born in 1964.  She was also on her second (out of an eventual four) husband.

Here she is looking all sultry on a rug.  This is one of our favourites, probably because of the hint of a knowing smile.

More random sixties furniture.

Playboy did like its girls to wear undone trousers in this period.

In these swimming pool ones she is just flashing her fur as well.

Angela reappeared on the cover of Playboy for the May 1968 issue as she had been chosen as Playmate of the Year.

Her pictorial opened with her perched on one of her prizes: a Playmate Pink AMX car.  This was a welcome prize as her car had just been stolen.  Other prizes included hi-fi, records, a bike, a scooter, lingerie, swimwear, a typewriter, art materials, Paul Masson pink (of course) sparkling wine and kitchen equipment.

Her second Playmate of the Year photo had her in this enticingly cut-out mini-dress.  One of her most appealing photos ever!

Her second outfit in the pictorial, we have to say, is not anything like as successful.  In fact it is truly horrendous and looks like it was knocked up from a particularly repulsive set of curtains.

In most of these pictures she is showing off a new hairstyle; shorter and having lost the fringe she had in her original Playmate of the Month feature.

Lying in the grass and displaying some remarkably perky nipples.

These two pictures, although part of the Playmate of the Year pictorial, were obviously taken when the Playmate of the Month shoot took place.

The final photograph is, again, from her earlier shoot.  Both were by Curt Gunther.

Here are some more which are similar to the Playmate of the Year shots.  This one of the dreadful curtain material outfit is slightly more effective because of Angela's lovely naked back.

Its not easy to carry off orange especially with a paisley pattern on it but she does it.  The smile in the top one helps a lot.

Victoria Cecilia Vetri was born on September 26th 1944 in San Francisco.  Both her parents were born in Italy.  Her father, a Sicilian restaurateur, was in trouble with the law, it seems, in the nineteen fifties and was convicted of running a prostitution ring in Los Angeles.  Over the years she became completely estranged from her family, even her son.

Despite being born in San Francisco Victoria was brought up in Los Angeles and studied art at Los Angeles City College in East Hollywood which has a starry list of alumni including, coincidentally, Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (as well as regular Star Trek composer Jerry Goldsmith).

Despite a similar picture appearing in her Playmate of the Year pictorial these look to be from her earlier shoot as she still has her fringe.  The bottom one is another rare, fluff flashing one.  It's amazing to think that someone actually had their wall painted like this in the sixties!

Finally, we have this sensuously enticing shot of Victoria on a bed also showing the then taboo pubic hair.

Mia Farrow (left) and Angela (right) in Rosemary's Baby

The month after her Playmate of the Year Playboy came out Roman Polanski's film Rosemary's Baby (1968) was released.  Angela appears in a scene with Mia Farrow at the beginning of the film.  Farrow had a line "You look like that Italian actress..." but Polanski hadn't got a suitable name to use.  Angela suggested "Victoria Vetri", explaining that it was her real name.  This was, therefore, used in the filmed scene.  It has created complete confusion ever since as to what was her real name and what was her stage name.

James Carreras with Victoria and director Val Guest on the set of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Victoria (she reverted to her real name and largely dropped Angela Dorian) next turned up in London at a press conference in the Dorchester in October 1968.  She had been chosen by Hammer Films founder James Carreras to star in their latest dinosaur epic When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, which is still Victoria's crowning achievement.  Hammer always kept an eye on potential starlets appearing in Playboy.  Before this they had used Playboy cover (March 1964) girl Olinka Berova in The Vengeance of She (1968), Miss August 1966 Susan Denberg in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) and would go on to cast twin Playmates Mary and Madeleine Collinson in Twins of Evil (1971).

Within days Victoria was off to the Canary Islands to shoot the location footage for the film.  The part called for a blonde but Victoria refused to dye her hair so a blonde wig had to be used instead.  Hammer had been surprised by the success of One Million Years BC and hoped to create another star of the magnitude of Raquel Welch, who was now too expensive for them to afford, with Victoria.  Here we see her being made up for a publicity bikini shot on location, together with the finished product.

Here are some more publicity photos from the set of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.  The mark she has on her forehead was featured in one of the scenes in the film.

Shooting carried on until January, back at Elstree studios in Britain, but the film wasn't released until October 1970 due to the time it took visual effects director Jim Danforth to produce the dinosaurs and scenic shots.  Even though the film was nearly a year away Playboy covered it in their Sex Stars piece in the December 1969 issue.  They featured this wonderful shot of Victoria in all her topless prehistoric glory whilst revealing that she had just signed seven year contract with Paramount.

The publicity team at Hammer worked with Playboy to produce enticing shots of Victoria which, unfortunately, weren't in the finished film.  So we have her being menaced by a giant crab (in an incredibly phallic shot) and being chased, naked, by a dinosaur.  A cropped version of the latter appeared in Playboy's November 1971 Sex in Cinema review.

When the film was eventually released in Britain it had an 'A' certificate.  In 1970 this meant that anyone over the age of five could be admitted although parents were advised that it was not suitable for those under the age of fourteen.  This was despite quite extensive nudity, including a tastefully naked love scene for Victoria and co-star Robin Hawdon.

When the film was released in the US four minutes of nudity was cut out and to this day has not been restored on US DVDs (except once, by accident, before it was withdrawn - but not before Agent Triple P got hold of a copy!).

We intend to cover Victoria's work in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth in considerably more detail in one of our other blogs Cavegirls in Fur Bikinis in the not too distant future.  In the meantime here is the definitive publicity still of Victoria from the film.

Nice baubles!

Readers of Playboy's December 1968 issue were presented with this new festive shot of Angela for a subscription advertisement.

A year after Victoria filmed When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth Apollo 12 landed on the Moon.  When astronaut Pet Conrad started his first moonwalk he worked through the checklist booklet attached to his space suit sleeve.  Suddenly, he found this picture of Angela.

Pete Conrad's illustrated checklist

The ground crew had added two Playmates each to Conrad and fellow Moon walker Al Bean's checklists.    When they spotted them they stopped their moonwalk activities to compare Playmates!  The caption under Angela's read "seen any interesting hills and valleys".  For the record the other Playmates were (Conrad) October 1967 Reagan Wilson and (Bean) January 1969 Leslie Bianchini and December 1969 Cynthia Myers.

In 1968 Playboy produced some jigsaw puzzles of Playboy centrefolds.  Angela's was one of those chosen to be sold in the tin can packaging. Triple P would love to own one of these but, sadly, the only one he's got is the later Collinson Twins one.

Victoria reappeared in Playboy's June 1971 issue which looked at all the previous Playmates of the Year.  The feature included  a previously unseen shot of her on the tiger skin from her original shoot.

In December Playboy used another still of Victoria from When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth in their Sex Stars feature. It appeared on a page which also included a photo of the Collinson twins who were starring in the later Hammer vehicle Twins of Evil (1971)

There was a small still of Victoria and the cast in Playboy's Sex in Cinema feature in November 1972 trailing her 1973 released film Group Marriage.  A sex comedy where Victoria plays a former stewardess.

More topless work followed in the SF B movie Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973).  But these would be Victoria's last films and she would only do one more piece of TV work in 1975.

Here is Victoria on the cover of Adam magazine's May 1973 issue.  She did do more nude modelling work but we have been unable to find it, sadly.

A couple more pictures of Victoria appeared in Playboy in the second half of the seventies in various Playmate review features.  This one, from June 1979 hadn't been seen before.

In 1984, however, she posed again for Playboy, at the age of 39 for their Playmates Forever pictorial.  She still looked very good indeed.

On the cover of Knight magazine in the sixties

A 1985 article about her said that she was working as a waitress at a restaurant called The Moustache Cafe in Hollywood.  It said that she had been attacked in her home in 1980 and stabbed with a screwdriver.  She was left with two broken ribs and a broken nose after the attack.  She was, at the time the article was written, trying to get back into films.

It was about this time that she started living with Bruce Rathgeb, who may or may not have been her husband for the next 25 years.  Certainly she adopted his last name.  Latterly the couple had been heavy alcohol and drugs users and neighbours said that noisy arguments were common.  One of which resulted in Victoria sustaining a broken arm, it is said.  

On October 16 2010 Victoria shot Rathgeb in the back as he was leaving her apartment after another fight.  They had been living apart for several months and Victoria accused Rathgeb of having been unfaithful during that time, which he denied.  She used a Walther PPK which had been given her by Roman Polanski for her self-defence after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate.  

She then lied to police when they arrived, saying that he had been shot by a drug dealer.  Rathgeb survived but has lost the use of some of his fingers and the bullet is still lodged in his body.  She was charged with attempted murder but her lawyer tried to get the charge reduced to assault with a deadly weapon.  The court turned this down and in the end she pleaded guilty to attempted voluntary manslaughter.  She was sentenced to nine years in prison in September 2011.

Vetri during her trial

Vetri is now 68 years old and still in prison where things can be particularly tough for celebrities  We don't know what sort of remission they get for good behaviour in US prisons but she is likely to be in jail for some years: a tragic fate for such a beauty.

We prefer to remember her in her magnificent prime and, as we mentioned, will feature her in Cavegirls in Fur Bikinis in the New Year.