Venus Observations

Roman Bathing Venus 2: In the Tepidarium by John William Godward

2012-01-30T14:56:00.000Z

In the Tepidarium (1913)

The classicist painter John William Godward didn't paint many nudes; largely relying on form fitting drapery to provide sensuous effect. We looked at one of his earlier pictures, Venus Binding her Hair (1897) in a previous post and explored his life until that point. In the Tepidarium was painted sixteen years later in Rome, rather than Chelsea, and is altogether a less monumental piece than the 90" tall Venus; this painting being around 40" tall.

Godward was driven away from his house, in 1905, due to the noise from the construction of the new Chelsea Football Club ground at Stamford Bridge. He took the opportunity to travel to Italy for the first time. Godward stayed in Capri but travelled around southern Italy, sketching.

In the Tepidarium pencil sketch (1913)

In the period 1910 to 1912 Godward moved to Rome more permanently and lived there, off and on, for a decade. Godward was finding that London was becoming hostile to his style of painting, as more modernist art held sway. He hoped that Rome might be more appreciative of his style. In addition, it seems that he left London to run off with his model, an Italian beauty. It was said that his mother never forgave him for this unseemly behaviour, especially as she had never wanted him to become an artist in the first place.

Godward acquired a studio at the Villa Strohl-Fern in Parioli (now a very smart suburb of Rome, full of ambassadors' residences) at the edge of the Borghese Gardens (where Triple P used to go running and to the Roman Sport Centre gym, built underneath them). Alfred Strohl-Fern (1847-1926) was an Alsatian who built the villa in 1879. The property had extensive wooded grounds which Strohl-Fern filled with classical statuary, grotoes and follies. By 1882 he had added nine artists studios and it soon became a creative colony, attracting painters, sculptors and musicians. One of the first artists to visit, thirty years before Godward, was Arnold Böcklin, the Swiss painter of The Isle of the Dead which inspired Rachmaninov's symphonic poem of the same name.

Godward's studio at the Villa Strohl-Fern

Godward's studio was at no 2 Villa Strohl-Fern and he spent every waking hour painting there. In the Tepidarium was painted there in 1913; a good year for Godward, as he had won the gold medal at the Rome International Exhibition with The Belvedere. This must have been a major filip for a painter who was feeling increasingly rejected at home.

Study for In the Tepidarium (1913)

There is an oil study for this painting which has the figure lightly clad in a diaphonous gown. Godward often changed his pictures from the original drawings or sketches and in this case we can see that he has moved the rather dominating curtain from in front of the figure to behind her in the final painting. He then counters this block of colour with another drape on the other side of the figure, whose brighter colour provides more balance than the darker example in the sketch. This sketch was sold by Christies in New York for $8,000 in 1994.

The draperies in the finished picture, which was sold for £25,000 in 1984, are perhaps not Godward's best and he always struggled with the nude figure but what is marvellous in this painting is his treatment of the interior decoration. At this point, perhaps inspired by the warmer weather in Rome, nearly all of Godward's paintings had an exterior setting so this was a rare incursion indoors. His handling of the marble in this painting (especially that of the square column, back centre) is superb. Even this pales in comparison to his rendering of the tesserae on the floor. Each one individually painted but shaded in such a way that the depressions in the floor can be seen by the alignment of the individual tiles. This must have been based on something he had seen in Rome, we suspect.

Centrefold Venus of the Month 31: Donna Michelle, December 1963

2012-01-20T17:37:00.001Z

Well, we are three weeks late for our December centrefold Venus but this post ended up rather longer than we thought it would! Although we had decided to widen the sources of our monthly centrefolds from the past you can't get away fom the fact that Playboy had some of the loveliest and so we return to Mr Hefner's publication once more. One of our favourites from the sixties is the beautiful Donna Michelle who first appeared in the December 1963 issue.

Donna Michelle was the pseudonym of Donna Ronne who was born in Los Angeles on December 8th 1945. Given that the December issue would have appeared at the end of November Donna was just seventeen when her centrefold appeared, despite Playboy's insistence in claiming to use only over eighteen year old models. Playboy later, for reasons that will become apparent, indicated that she was actually older than this.

Donna could easily feature as one of our flexible venuses as she had danced with the New York Ballet (although, presumably not for very long) and the photographer of the black and white pictures in the pictorial, Edmund Leja, put her through some balletic paces at the Eddie Gay Dance Studio in Hollywood.

Donna was spotted as a potential Playmate in a high school play by a co-performer who was the daughter of photographer Edmund Leja, who shot the black and white pictures here and the colour portrait below.

Donna attended the Reseda High School in the San Fernando Valley which was the first new high school to be built (in 1955) in the US after WW2. It is a popular filming location and several episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were filmed there.

She looks untterly gorgeous in the limited number of pictures that we got with her pictorial. The one of her and the records being Triple P's favourite.

When her Playmate of the Month issue hit the newstands Donna had already become Hugh Hefner's girlfriend. She had first arrived at the Chicago Mansion in late autumn. Still seventeen, although subsequent Playboy publications maintain that she was eighteen; Hefner was thirty seven at the time.

December 1963 was Playboy's tenth anniversary edition and to celebrate, the editor (Hefner, of course) chose his ten favourite Playmates of the more than one hundred who had posed over the previous decade. Diplomatically, he included Donna, so we got three more pictures of her outside of her Playmate pictorial; a first.

These three photos are all by Edmund Leja who was born in Detroit in 1919 and was an engineer by trade. His photographic work, from the forties onwards, was done in his spare time when not working for the likes of Chrysler, Lockeed and Rocketdyne. It was only in the early sixties that he went full time as a photographer. He also discovered Teddi Smith, Miss July 1960, and shot the non-centrefold pictures for her pictorial, and would discover Lori Winstone, Miss June 1964, the only one of his three Playmates he would actually shoot the centrefold for.

Leja would continue shooting glamour work until the early eighties and died in 2002. Although a very fine photographer of the female nude his reputation is somewhat tarnished these days by his involvement with the naturist pictorial magazine Nudist Moppets and another photographer, Ron Raffaelli, who was arrested in the seventies for inappropriate photography of minors. Leja, himself, we have to say, was never arrested.

Donna reappeared in the May 1964 issue, as Playmate of the year, where she was on one of Playboy's great covers of the sixties; her flexible figure contorted into the shape of the rabbit-head logo. Playboy art director Art Paul had had the idea for a model to get into the shape of the rabbit head for the cover but didn't think that anyone could manage it. "I asked Donna and there was no problem. She got into the position with great ease and could still smile," he said.

Hefner was still entranced enough by Donna that he gave her an unprecedented ten pages for her Playmate of the Year pictorial. The pictures were taken by Pompeo Posar, who had also shot her centrefold for six months before.

The opening set of images from this pictorial, taken from the cover shoot session, demonstrate Donna's flexibility and, unusually for the time, her well-defined muscle tone.

As Hefner's girlfriend Donna was a great party girl and he reported that she was upset that because of President Kennedy's assasination in November 1963 all the nightlife was shut down and there was nothing else on TV.

After a quick snack Donna pulls some shapes and shows off her extremely impressive 5'4", 38-22-37 figure.

Donna was a classically-trained child prodigy pianist who once came second in a piano competition to Little Richard.

These final shots from her Playmate of the Year pictorial were shot in Hugh Hefner's bedroom (where she spent a lot of time!) at the Chicago Playboy mansion. This was before the installation of his notorious revolving round bed. What an utterly gorgeous creature she is in these!

Other photos from this shoot regularly turned up in the magazine and other Playboy publications for decades to come. The reason for this, we suspect (other than Donna's undoubted charms) are that the pictures are so classic; her make-up, for example is reasonably natural and doesn't scream sixties. In these ones with just the black background the images are timeless.

The decor of these place them rather more firmly in the past.

These two fine studies of her standing on the bed, unlike some of the other extras here, had no equivalents in her Playmate of the Year pictorial. The bottom one is rather classical. She looks like an Ancient Greek statue come to life.

These final ones of Donna disporting herself on the bed are, again, classic stuff. Plain white sheets never date!

The Reef Club before its transformation into a Playboy resort hotel

Donna's next appearance in the magazine didn't take long and she reappeared in a pictorial about Hefner's acquisition of a hotel in Jamaica in the September 1964 issue. The Playboy team had already decided to buy the Reef Club for $6.5 million to turn it into a Playboy resort hotel but, like everything else in the Playboy empire, the personal approval of Hefner was required.

The resort's 50m pool in its Playboy heyday in the sixties

Originally the Marrakesh Beach Hotel & Cabana Club, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher had spent their honeymoon there. It would open as the first Playboy resort hotel in January 1965. It would be sold as part of Playboy's cost cutting campaign in 1977 and is now the Beaches Boscabel Resort and Golf Club.

The hotel today

Hefner and his team, which included Donna, flew from Chicago, in a Jetstar private jet leant to him by Lockheed, in January 1964. On arrival at Montego bay they transferred to a de Havilland Heron for the flight to Ocho Rios. This was to be Playboy's first resort hotel, much to the delight of the Jamaican tourist board. Hefner's decicion to approve the deal and the fact that he was going to hire local girls as bunnies made front page news there.

Donna was much in evidence in the pictorial whether trying out the buffet, chatting with Hefner and one of his friends or distracting her opponents with her pool-playing outfit in what would become the Playmate bar.

Of course the magazine took advantage of Donna's presence on the trip to adorn the article, which was a rather dry blow by blow report of the Playboy team's tour of the hotel, with some suitably tropical pictures.

Here Donna decorates Dunn's River Falls which are also in Ocho Rios, not far from the hotel. They are famous for appearing in the first James Bond film Dr No (1962) as well as being one of the few waterfalls in the world that empties into the sea. After Hefner returned to Chicago he received a note from Ian Fleming, whose house Goldeneye was nearby, commenting on the stir the imminent arrival of a Playboy resort in Jamiaca was causing locally.

These two pictures didn't appear in the September 1964 pictorial but we couldn't possibly leave them out!

Here are Hefner and Donna during their trip to Jamaica in January 1964. When he wasn't checking out the facilities of the hotel he was checking out Donna's facilities (as Playboy might have said).

During her Playmate of the Year pictorial shoot, Pompeo Posar took several Christmas-themed pictures and these would appear in a number of places in the magazine over the next few years; particularly as festive themed advertisements for subscriptions as a christmas present.

December 1964 saw Donna appearing in the magazine yet again. Firstly, she appeared in this subscription advertisement.

From December 1964

Secondly, when Playboy had offered its choice of Hefner's favourite Playmates from their first ten years some readers wrote in saying that there should be a public poll as to who were the favourites.

Playboy promised to do this for the end of their tenth anniversary year and so the December 1964 issue contained a pictorial of the ten Playmates the readers had chosen. Fortunately seven out of the ten were the same as Hefner's choice including, of course, Donna Michelle, who was illustrated with these three pictures.

Donna's domination continued with her appearing on the cover of the 1965 Playboy Calendar where she was Miss December.

Readers didn't have to wait very long for another dose of Donna who re-appeared in a pictorial in the February 1965 issue looking at her reign as Playmate of the Year. "Ballerina, pianist, student, sportswoman and actress - our most gifted gatefold eyeful to date," gushed the text.

Gifted she certainly was as, for the first time, as Playmate of the Year she was given $10,000 of items, many in the newly invented Playboy Pink. Donna soon traded in the bright pink Ford Mustang in favour of a less conspicuous Volkswagen. "Everyone would point and follow you!" she later said.

The piece also looked at Donna's appearance on the ABC TV Steve Allen show and her first stage appearance, with Macdonald Carey whose daughter Lynn would go on to be the December 1972 Penthouse Pet of the Month.

The piece wasn't all reportage, however, Playboy took advantage of the opportunity to have Donna posed enticingly on a lion skin in a new set of pictures.

From Mickey One

The final part of the pictorial showcased Donna's role in a forthcoming film, Mickey One, starring newcomer Warren Beatty (locking lips with Donna, bottom right) and directed by Arthur Penn. Two years later Penn and Beatty would team up again for Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

What a lovely pair of bongos. Donna and Penn on set

Donna and Warren Beatty on set

Mickey One is an ambitious and stylish film, filmed entirely in Chicago and with an excellent soundtrack by Stan Getz, but is largely forgotten today. Sadly, as is often the case with centrefolds, Donna's part was "The girl". Although the article made much of the fact that film offers had come "flooding in" following her Playmate pictorial in fact it was Hefner's influence that got her the role.

Donna in a publicity still from Mickey One

This wan't her first role, however, she had had small parts in a couple of other films and had appeared several times in the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

In the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

In Big Valley

The following year she would appear in the western TV series The Big Valley. She would appear in a few more TV shows and films, notably in the French film Le Bal de Voyous (1968) where she had a high billing. Her last role was a minor one in the 1971 TV movie Company of Killers.

The end of 1965 would see Donna featuring again in the 1966 Playboy calendar, this time as Miss February. She would also appear the following year for July, in a picture taken during her trip to Jamaica in 1964.

The next girl: Hefner, Donna with Mary Warren in the backround

Inevitably, Hefner moved on from Donna, who he seemed genuinely fond of. He said: "Donna was a stunner. She was also unpredictable and that was part of the attraction, I think. I knew it would never work as a lasting relationship" Her replacement was Mary Warren who worked in the Playboy offices before becoming a bunny.

In the January 1966 issue an article on the Playboy mansion had this picture of a submerged Donna in the famous pool photographed from the underwater bar.

In December 1967 she appeared, away from Playboy, in the French Lui magazine in a pictorial that saw her dressed up in a number of "fancy dress" outfits lbased on shows that had appeared on French TV. This picture is (very) loosely based on the popular French TV series Therry La Fronde, which was about France under the occupation of the English in the fourteenth century.

The second one has her in the South Pacific setting of the US import, Adventures in Paradise or Les Aventures dans les iles as the French translated it.

Here she is in a groovy sixties chair for Des agents très spéciaux which was the French name for The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which Donna had appeared, of course, in three episodes and some of the theatrical films they made from these episodes for the overseas market.

This one illustrates another US TV series from the early sixties, The Untouchables or Les Incorruptibles, as the French would have it. This is the only picture we have been able to find of Donna in stockings.

Next, they have Donna falling out of a flight suit for the then brand-new French series Les Chevaliers du Ciel which was about fighter pilots. A dubbed version was shown on British TV and Triple P actually watched this one!

Finally, she is in western gear for what the French called Au nom de la loi, which was the early Steve McQueen starring show, Wanted: Dead or Alive.

In 1968 she appeared in the Dutch magazine De Lach (The Laugh). This was a magazine with a long history of displaying pictures of scantily and (latterly) naked women, especially featuring film actresses. It was first published in 1928 and soldiered on into the seventies.

Pictures from this shoot by Giancarlo Botti also turned up in the March 1969 issue of Cavalier in the US. Here it was revealed that Donna had moved to Paris to work.

In November 1970 she appeared in the Italian magazine Fiesta (not to be confused with the UK publication of the same name). She was looking a lot skinnier in this shoot than she had for Playboy.

It wasn't until June 1971 that we had a new picture of Donna in Playboy. This was for a pictorial on all the previous Playmates of the Year.

The January 1974 issue was the twentieth anniversary one and it wasn't surprising, given her popularity, that Donna turned up once more in another old photograph, albeit, again, one that hadn't been seen before.

Donna shoots Diane Kozlow

In April that year Donna was featured again, but this time behind the lens as she was now a photographer. Playboy showed her photographing a number of models. Donna became interested in photography during her original Playmate shoot and had bombarded Pompeo Posar with questions. An interest became a hobby and then she started doing professional work although she didn't progress to nudes until later.

Of course they couldn't miss the opportunity to show Donna again and so gave us the fine study above. They were certainly getting their money's worth from the original shoots! It was revealed that Donna, back from Paris, was now living on a ranch in Northern California.

More pictures of Donna appeared in the magazine during the seventies and indeed, afterward, usually in some sort of pictorial review of past Playmates or the newsstand specials which started in the eighties. Here are a couple more featuring the polar bear skin.

Donna appeared at the Playboy Playmate reunion which was featured in the April 1980 edition where she appeared in a photograph with Hefner.

Hefner and Donna at the Playmate reunion, 1980

In April 1984 Donna appeared in Playboy once more, in a contemporary photo taken over twenty years after her first appearance, in a Playmates revisited feature.

In her late thirties she looks elegantly gorgeous in her only full frontal shot. Here are a couple more pictures from this shoot as well.

Donna was certainly one of the most beautiful Playmates of the sixties and, probably, of all time. Her voluptuous figure fitted the Playmate profile very well and, no doubt because of her association with Hefner at the time, she got intensive coverage in the magazine which translated into reader popularity. In addition, her iconic cover photograph by Pompeo Posar for her Playmate of the Year issue is such that Triple P's Playboy desk calendar for this year carries the image on the cover.

Sadly, Donna died in April 2004 at the age of 58 but her image will surely live on for many years.

Roman Bathing Venus 1: by Roy Krenkel

2012-01-18T16:29:00.000Z

We have decided to start a series of pictures of women in Roman baths but rather than beginning with one of the usual Victorian classicist paintings we were very taken by this fine study by American illustrator Roy G Krenkel (1918-1983) whilst researching some pictures for our Cavegirls in Fur Bikinis blog.

Although Krenkel studied at the Art Student's League in the late thirties he was largely self-taught and was influenced by many things (he was an inveterate museum visitor, for example). However, his voluptuously curvy women were certainly influenced by the work of the Australian painter Norman Lindsay the subject of one of Agent Triple P's favourite films, Sirens (1993).

This sketch and the finished drawing above feature the tepidarium of the Baths of Caracalla. These thermae (public baths) were built quite late in the Roman period (begun in 212 AD) and were the largest in the world on completion in 217 AD. Covering a massive 27 acres they had seating for 1600 people. Named after Emperor Caracalla (this was a nickname, he was actually called Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), during whose reign they were built, they continued as functional baths until 573 AD when invading Goths destroyed the aqueduct that supplied them with water.

Tepidarium of Caracalla (detail)

Krenkel has depicted both men and women sharing the facilities at the same time whereas, in fact, access to thermae for men and women was seperated by time, with women visiting from first thing in the morning until 2.00pm. After this men had access until dusk. Interestingly, women were charged double what the men paid. Although technically men and women weren't supposed to be at the baths at the same time, and no well bought up Roman woman would dream of being so, prostitutes did frequent the baths at the same time as the men; although this was often officially banned by various emperors. Krenkel's women depicted here, therefore must be of the "loose" type!

The baths today. Just behind the ugly white building at top left (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) can be seen the site of the Circus Maximus

Agent Triple P has visited the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome and they are still very imposing, despite the depredations of earthquakes and the looting of stones for building materials. Many years ago, when Triple P was in Rome, setting up an office for his firm, we used to run past the baths whilst training for the London Marathon as they were on the road that led to the Via Appia Antica, which was our favoured training route.

Teenage Nudist Venus

2012-01-15T16:07:00.001Z

Well, not really. Zakkers has pointed out a TV documentary on Channel 4 which Triple P missed last week. Now Channel 4, which is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, was supposed to be a high-brow channel catering to minority interests. Lately, critics have been saying it has fallen a long way from its original, lofty, educational values. The title of last week's documentary, My Daughter the Teenage Nudist, exemplifies this exactly.

Broadly, the programme made the assertion that more teenagers (of both sexes, but concentrating on the female makes a much more appealing title, of course) were espousing going around with no clothes on. Meanwhile, others in the programme were trying to recruit more younger people into the naturist movement (a particularly delicate task, we would think).

Anyway, there were perilously few teenage female nudists in the programme but one rather fetching twenty-five year old, Alex, (pictured above). Triple P, of course, thinks attitudes to nudity are bizarre in many countries but we don't particularly think that the naturist movement helps in delivering a better public attitude to nudity as they exist in a self imposed ghetto which, almost by definition, is keeping bodies hidden; unless you are a member of the club. The real issue for Triple P with naturists is that they do everything without clothes; a wholly fake existence. A properly adjusted society would, of course, expect appropriate clothes for different activities but not have a problem with, for example, nudity at the beach or in saunas (Agent DVD had an interesting experience of the different attitudes of continental women to the latter when working in Switzerland).

Attitudes to public nudity vary from country to country, of course, with Britain being somewhere in the middle. Although there are nudist beaches in the UK they never seem very popular (partly because of our weather) but there is certainly a fair amount of topless female sunbathing in those few sunny days we do get in the summer. But is this a trend that's increasing? British girls are happier to strip off when abroad and this is certainly more likely than thirty years ago, for example. We are not yet, however, relaxed enough about our bodies to not blink at the sort of public nudity (especially male) seen on the beaches of Northern Europe. The key thing here is that naked and dressed people mix freely and are not seperated into ghettos.

In America, things are more restrictive than here. Triple P's German friend B was given a warning by a policeman on Santa Monica beach for being briefly topless whilst she changed into her swimsuit; something that would have not caused any reaction on a Baltic (or even British) beach. In the UK, of course, being naked as a man in public used to be a criminal offence whereas a woman being naked wasn't. The Sexual Offences Act of 2003 now makes it clear that naked swimming or sunbathing is no longer an offence, whichever sex you are. Now it's only a problem if the intent is to shock.

So, it doesn't look like we are going to be inundated with teenage nudists any time soon, despite Channel 4's assertions. Triple P has only two stories about teenage, naked girls.

A few years ago Triple P was down in Chichester Harbour, one hot (we do get them sometimes) summer day, with a large group of friends and relations and we met up with another family and their equally extended group. Anyway there was much swimming off the beach and, afterwards, one young (fifteen we subsequently discovered) lady from the other group engaged us in an interesting (to Triple P, anyway) story about Roman ship's anchors being found off the beach. As she did this she stripped off her one piece swimsuit , towelled herself down and then got dressed. She was naked on the beach for maybe thirty seconds and all the time telling me about this Roman ship landing point. It could have been a sexual tease, of course (she had a fine, mature, body for a late teenager, with those perfect, hemispherical breasts that pre-gravity girls of that age have), and she exuded physical self-confidence. However we don't think so. She was just relaxed about being naked in a context where that would be perfectly natural (changing on the beach).

The reason we think this is because of our other story, which relates to a male friend who came home early from work one day to find his sixteen year old daughter and half a dozen of her friends naked in his kitchen, as they had been skinny dipping in his pool. None of them made any attempt to cover themselves up because, due to the age difference (he was in his mid forties at the time) they didn't regard him as a man, just an old person!

Jenny floats

So, as the law here now recognises, the difference between acceptable nudity and unacceptable is the presence of some sort of sexual intent or situation. In films, the British Board of Film Classification is quite happy to let non-sexual nudity appear in a "PG" or even a "U" film which, forty years ago, would have required an "AA" or an "X" certificate. The 1971 film Walkabout contains several full frontal shots of Jenny Agutter and was originally classified as an "AA" (equivalent to "15") but the DVD is now classified as a "12".

In America there are some who seem to equate all nudity with sexuality. This, to most Europeans, is a very bizarre attitude but as long as people have this link in their minds we are not going to be seeing many more naked teenagers on the streets!

Birthday Venus: Echo Johnson

2012-01-11T21:32:00.000Z

Today is Agent Triple P's birthday (oh no, not another one!) and to celebrate we present a few pictures of someone else born on 11th January: Playboy's Playmate of the Month for January 1993 Echo Johnson.

There are not a lot of famous people who share Triple P's birthday and Echo doesn't appear on any of the lists we looked at.

We are quite critical of the current standard of photography in Playboy and, indeed, the quality of their Playmates and prefer those from the sixties, seventies and (especially) the eighties.

Texan-born Echo, however, is a naturally beautiful girl and very much to Triple P's taste as, unlike Hugh Hefner, we do not have a thing for plastic-looking, busty blondes.

We went out to lunch today but are having a quiet evening so plan to just open a nice bottle of Champagne later, as we are feeling our age!

Non-Centrefold Venus of the Month 4: Raven, December 1973

2011-12-30T19:45:00.000Z

Just time to get December's non-centrefold of the month posted, in the lovely form of "Raven" from Men Only's December 1973 issue.

She is just the sort of dark, exotic lovely who appeals to Triple P and the fact that she is posed in a nice tropical-looking setting helps immensely as the usual festive season drizzle runs down our window on this dreary afternoon.

Hers is a steamy, sultry appeal and we can only imagine being in her basic cabin in the humid heat as she lounges around or takes a cooling bath in a wooden tub.

It's a short pictorial this but benefits from some large full-page pictures and not too many of those picture in picture pages that the Paul Raymod magazines often annoyingly went in for.

Raven, does sluttily sultry very well, we have to say, and this picture is our favourite from the pictorial.

In their usual nonsensical way Men Only waffled on, in the text accompanying the pictorial, about the fact that she was from Knightsbridge in London and had only just returned home from travelling abroad. Utter rubbish of course as whilst she conceivably could be British she really looks like she hails from somewhwere rather more exotic.

Anyway, she is a very fine antidote to a dreary day, we think.

Although we have no information on the model the photographer is Frenchman Serge Jacques, one of the longest serving glamour photographers in the world. He originally started taking pictures of naked women back in the late forties; contributing many photos to the French magazine Paris-Hollywood which he published. This was really the first truly international mens' magazine.

Originally it featured photo sets of (clothed) starlets and topless cabaret girls but, over time, the actresses disappeared to be replaced by more naked models. The magazine ran from 1947 until 1973.

Alice Amo by Serge Jacques

Jacques himself ran into trouble a lot in the fifties as his pubic hair flashing models were deemed indecent and he was arrested by the French police, who regularly raided his studio, many times.

Brigitte Bardot by Serge Jacques

His most famous images were probably the ones he took of a very young Brigitte Bardot on a beach in St Tropez.

Another Jacques lovely

Jacques went on to work for all of the top mens' magazines in the seventies: Oui, Playboy, Penthouse, Chic, Club International, Mayfair etc. Amazingly he is still photographing naked ladies, in his studio in Prague (as he says Eastern Europe is where the most attractive women come from - we have to agree), at the age of 83.

Serge Jacques

Most Unfortunate Venuses: 25 bad centrefolds from Playboy - 12 to 1

2011-12-29T09:48:00.001Z

Having looked at the number 25 to number 12 bad Playboy centrefolds we finish our review of centrefolds which make Agent Triple P cringe and look at the top 12, starting with this early effort.

12 Barbara Cameron. November 1955

Although Miss Cameron has a nice face and figure we just can't get over that Brillo pad hair. Not sexy! Also, the way the tie hangs so as to obscure her face in the mirror is a mistake.

11 Rusty Fisher. April 1956

More nasty hair in this one and an awkward pose to boot. The baggy jeans make it look like her bottom half has been pasted on from a picture one and a half times the size. A very ugly picture.

10 Alice Denham. July 1956

Another most unfortunate picture from 1956. We can see what they were trying to do here with a pillow fighting picture but the suspicion is that most of the "feathers" have been (badly) added afterwards. Most don't look like feathers at all and just serve to obscure Miss Denham. Frankly it looks like a seagull has done a poo on the picture and then walked up and down on it.

9 Heather Ryan. July 1967

Again, Miss Ryan is a nice looking girl with an eye-catching figure but she looks very stiff and uncomfortable here. Frankly, she looks like some sort of stiff-limbed Frankenstein's monster who has just lurched out of the sea. We wouldn't be at all surprised to find a couple of bolts in her neck. The backlighting doesn't help either.

8 Sandra Settani. April 1964

Here we have Miss Settani in the landed tuna pose. That's not the real problem though; its dull but not offensive as such. No the problem is her hair. It has so much lacquer on (presumably to stop it blowing around everywhere in the wind) that it looks like it has been carved out of wet tarmac and plopped on her head. The sailor hat just draws attention to this terrifying confection as it shows how big her hair is. The forward sweeping horns look strong enough to hang lifebelts on. Every time we see this picture we can imagine touching her hair and our hand just sticking fast to it!

7 Jean Cannon. October 1961

Thrust between the trunks of two trees much of Miss Cannon is obscured; the foreground trunk cutting across her form in a particularly jarring way. What is worse is why on earth the photographer chose trees covered with distracting graffitti.

6 Sally Sheffield. May 1969

Sally has what Agent DVD would call a "hard" face and photographing it from this angle does her no favours. The half closed eyes don't help either.

5 Jessica St George. February 1965

Jessica looks really uncomfortable here and her face is frozen into a nasty rictus that makes her look for all the world like dwarf actor Warwick (Willow) Davis.

4 Jean Moorehead. October 1955

Poor Jean has to cope with really big knickers, a see through petticoat that just draws attention to her solid thighs and a cluttered set. Very unflattering. Even worse, the previous centrefolds stuck to the door show how good other ones had been.

3 Carol Eden. December 1960

Cursed with a hairdo that must have been old fashioned even in 1960 and photographed from an angle that no woman looks good from this is an insipid and unattractive shot.

2 Jackie Rainbow. October September 1954

This one is so old fashioned it could have come from the thirties. An unflattering angle, a bad hair style and a ridiculous nineteen twenties pose makes this a horribly contrived and unattractive picture.

1 Clayre Peters. August 1959

So here it is. In Agent Triple P's opinion, the worst centrefold Playboy has ever produced. Wearing a quite hideous and nasty coloured negligee which almost looks painted on rather than real, a glassy-eyed Clayre poses uncomfortably inside a door. She looks exactly like a zombie advancing unsteadily towards the camera. The idea of a successful centrefold should be that you should want to step into the picture not run for your life. Nasty!

Our next Playboy themed post is going to look at the evolution of the portrayal of naked women on the cover and their subsequent retreat from that.

Most Unfortunate Venuses: 25 bad centrefolds from Playboy - Part one: 25-13

2011-12-28T13:23:00.001Z

Agent Triple P's friend HMS is a laconic Northener and one of his distinctive phrases, when being presented with something perhaps not of the highest quality or otherwise ill-conceived, is that something is "most unfortunate". Some time ago we looked at all our favourite Playboy centrefolds month by month; picking a handful as being especially pleasing to Triple P. We have a screen saver which puts up pictures of Playmate centrefolds of that particular month and occasionally we are taken by a particularly bad one. So this post looks at all the really bad centrefold pictures there have been. The choice is no reflection on the women concerned; just their centrefold pictures.

The American science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon created Sturgeon's Law a few years ago; which is that 95% of anything is crap. On the whole Playboy centrefolds do not fit this rule although it is arguable that most are a bit dull and that often, given the limitations of the format, better pictures of the girls are often in the main pictorial. A couple of dozen are, however, for Triple P more than just dull; they are actually just awful and often make an otherwise attractive young woman look terrible. British TV is full of "list programmes" at this time of the year (Fifty worst celebrity moments of 2011etc.) which give gainful employment to a small group of second rate comedians who only seem to appear on these sort of shows. So this is our particular selection of the most unfortunate 25 centrefold pictures Playboy has produced over the last six decades or so. As is the case for list TV programmes we will attempt to put them in some sort of order, with the least awful being at number 25 and the worst being at number one.

Number 25: Athena Lundberg, January 2006

Really a demonstration of everything that is wrong with current Playboy photography. Super bright, over-saturated bubblegum colours, over-photoshopped, plastic-looking body and lighting provided by a searchlight. It's included here, though, because of the ludicrously over the top and utterly distracting cartoon background. There is a girl in this picture but it may take you some time to spot her.

Number 24: Jillian Grace, March 2005

Jillian is a lovely girl with a fine, natural body but they have made her adopt a most uncomfortable and clumsy looking pose here, with her right leg bent and placed to one side. We never look at the rest of her as we can't take our eyes off that awkwardly placed knee and foot.

Number 23: Sandra Edwards, March 1957

Sandra is an attractive lady but not in red tights, which make her look extremely solid below the waist and completely dominate the picture, despite the attempt to ameliorate this effect by placing other random blobs of red in the frame. We don't like the heavy flick up eye make-up either.

Number 22: Marianne Gaba, September 1959

The wearing a shirt and nothing else look can be very effective (Penthouse used the clothed top and unclothed bottom half extensively in the mid sixties, for example) but this is an ungainly pose which doesn't even show off Miss Gaba's impressive posterior to best effect.

Number 21: Gwen Wong, April 1967

Gwen is a spectacularly pretty girl and her outfit is cute as well but we just can't get past that hair! It just completely dominates her rather delicate features and is just plain silly, even for the sixties. We suspect that underneath that huge pile of hair she is really a Martain from Mars Attacks!

Number 20: Stella Stevens, January 1960

There is nothing particularly wrong with this shot of actress Stella Stevens; it's just dull. However, January 1960 is our birth month and we really wanted a better centrefold than this. She just sort of lies there as an inert object, like a tuna on a fishmonger's slab.

Number 19: Lorrie Menconi, February 1969

It's easy to spot the two reasons Lorrie was chosen as a Playmate but Triple P can't take his eyes off her strange bendy mouth smile. Unlike one of the other shots in her pictorial where her smile looks genuine this looks terribly forced; not surprising after days of posing, probably, but it puts Triple P off completely.

Number 18: Zahra Nobo, March 1958

In Playboy's pre-pubic days the need to hide their models' groins was a constant source of difficulty. However, there were considerably more elegant solutions than standing her behind a post and then having to get her to bend sideways so we could still see her face. This pose also makes it look like she has no waist either. The hand to the face makes it look as if she has bad toothache too.

Number 17: Felicia Atkins, April 1958

More terrible eye make-up makes poor Felicia look positively demonic. Unusually for a Playboy centrefold she is not looking at the camera which just makes her appear to be in some mad reverie of her own. Triple P finds this image very disturbing!

Number 16: Linda Moon, October 1966

Linda is a big girl in every way but this low-angle shot on her face, a very unflattering haircut and the pose make her look like an East German shot putter. Elegant it is not.

Number 15: Nadine Chanz, October 1996

Another very awkward pose for Nadine whose dropped right shoulder and tilted head makes it look as if her face has been badly photoshopped onto her admittedly impressive body. She looks very uncomfortable in every way.

Number 14: Mercy Rooney, December 1972

So, lovely all the way down to her hips and then...GOAT! Who could possibly have thought that this was an attractive outfit! Bizarre and offputting!

Number 13: Gay Collier, July 1967

So Gay might have been able to just get away with this cheesy pose and unattractive smirk but any chance of redeeming the picture is ruined by that ridiculous flower which makes her look like the centrefold of Playclown. They even titled her pictorial clown princess even though there was nothing about clowns in the piece, just her wanting to be a ballerina, but presumably even the copwriter was overcome by this most bizarre of all Playboy centrefolds.

Next time we will look at the most loathsome dozen centrefolds and announce our all time worst.

A Happy Christmas...

2011-12-24T10:13:00.000Z

...to all our readers! We very much appreciate all our followers and those who take time to comment on our illustrated ramblings! We will be back with more lovely Venuses after Christmas.

Venus as mistress: Early Morning by Sir William Orpen

2011-12-23T10:20:00.095Z

Early Morning (1922)

This is an affectionate portrait of Yvonne Aubicque, the mistress of its painter, Irish artist Sir William Orpen (1878-1931), who has several fascinating stories connected to her which we will examine in this post. Called, Early Morning it is a wonderful evocation of the pleasures of a mistress, as she sits surrounded by domestic detrius that indicates no great desire to leave her bed anytime soon.

William Orpen

William Orpen was born in Dublin and attended the Metropolitan School of Art there to which he was admitted at the age of eleven, such was his natural skill. At the age of seventeen he moved to London to attend the Slade School of Art. Catching the attention of John Singer Sargent he rapidly became one of the country's top portrait painters. Although he married and had three children he had a string of mistresses, many of whom modelled for him, despite constant worries about his unattractiveness (caused, it is said, by overhearing his parents asking themselves why he was so ugly and their other children so attractive!). We will look at some of his other fine nudes another time but now we just want to concentrate on one of his model/mistresses, Yvonne Aubicque.

The Spy/The Refugee I (1918)

In 1916 Orpen was appointed as an official war artist and carried on in this role after the war where he was was the offical painter of the Versailles treaty signing. While in France he fell head over heels for Yvonne Aubicque, the daughter of the Mayor of Lille. He painted two portraits of her during the war but when he sent the paintings back to Britain he found himself in hot water, as official war artists were only supposed to paint pictures of military subjects.

The Spy/The Refugee II (1917)

Even worse, he had called his pictures of her "The Spy" and claimed she was a German spy who had been executed by the French, no doubt in order to give it an acceptable "military" provenance. However, the subject of female spies was sensitive at this period as English nurse Edith Cavell had been shot by the Germans for helping allied soldiers to escape and Mata Hari had also just been executed. Orpen found himself facing a court martial and had to confess that the paintings were of his mistress. One of Orpen's friends was Lord Beaverbrook who was instrumental in preventing the court martial, although Orpen was severely reprimanded and only just hung on to his official war artist role. Orpen changed the name of the pictures to The Refugee and, like his war paintings, they now belong to the Imperial War Museum in London.

The Beaverbrooke copy on the Antiques Roadshow

There is an interesting coda to this story. Last year a man brought a picture along to the filming of the BBC show Antiques Roadshow, where members of the public bring along items and a panel of experts tell them about them. It was a copy of Orpen's The Refugee I. The owner had taken it to the Imperial War Musem who had said it was just a standard copy. He was not convinced, however, and was puzzled by the high quality of the picture and the fact it was signed Nepro Mailliw (William Orpen written backwards). He discovered that in 1920 Orpen had gone back to France and painted another version of the painting for Lord Beaverbrook as a thank you for helping him escape a court martial. The expert on the show confirmed that the picture was indeed a copy but was made by Orpen himself and was the long lost Beaverbrook version. Much to the owner's shock he valued it at £250,000.

Yvonne Aubicque in 1918

What happened to the lovely Yvonne? She remained as Orpen's mistress for more than ten years; although he usually ran more than one simultaneously. When in France, after the war, he had bought a black Rolls-Royce and hired a sixteen year old called William Grover as his chauffeur. Grover was the son of an English father and a French mother but had been born in France. He immediately took a fancy to Yvonne and she him. You might expect all sorts of problems to follow but when Yvonne stopped being Orpen's mistress he gave her his Rolls-Royce and a large house in Paris. Grover and Yvonne married in 1929. Grover had always been keen on cars and motorcycles and started to race motorcycles at the age of fifteen. Worried about what his father might think he used the psedonym W Williams when he started to race. By 1926 he had graduated to car racing. In 1928 he won the French Grand Prix and in 1929, in a British Racing Green Bugatti, he won the inaugural Monaco Grand Prix. Now known as Grover-Williams he retired from racing to concentrate on business including working for Bugatti and running a kennel where Yvonne bred Highland Terriers which she successfully showed at Crufts dog show, eventually becoming a judge there. They were a wealthy couple and, apparently, good dancers, winning several competitions.

Grover Williams leading the 1929 Monaco Grand Prix

With the German invasion of France Grover-Williams fled to Britain where, because of his fluency in both French and English, he was recruited into the Special Operations Executive where he was trained at their wartime base, the home of Lord Montague, Beaulieu in Hampshire, now, ironically, the site of the National Motor Museum. Grover-Williams was dropped into France, with no contacts or support on the ground, and was instructed to set up a new resistance network in Paris, as the previous one had been compromised. Yvonne moved back to Paris as well although she lived in their house in Rue Weber while he lived in a seperate apartment. He recruited two former fellow racing drivers and they began sabotage work, pricipally at the Citroen factory. In August 1943 Grover-Williams was captured by the Germans as their netwok had been compromised and it was belived that he was interrogated by the Gestapo and shot almost immediately.

However, in the 1990's a different story emerged. It looked as if Grover-Williams survived and was taken to a prison camp in Poland. It then appears that he joined MI6 after the war. Even more strangely, in 1948 a man called George Tambal turned up at Yvonne's house in Evreux and moved in with her. She introduced him as her cousin but the locals thought they acted more like lovers. He claimed to have arrived from America via Uganda, bringing animals for the depleted zoos of Europe. Grover-Williams, it should be noted, had family in America and a sister in Uganda. Also, amazingly, Tambal's date of birth was exactly the same as Grover-Willams. Tambal was very knowlegeable about motor cars and bore the scars of a beating around the head.

No-one has ever proved it conclusively but it looks like Grover-Williams survived the war, joined MI6 (MI6 have admitted they know what happened to Grover-Willams but they won't say what) and then rejoined his wife in Evreux. She died in 1973 and Tambal/Grover-Williams was killed in 1983, at the age of eighty, having been knocked off his bicycle by a car driven by a German tourist.

Elements of this remarkable story were used by Robert Ryan in his novel Early One Morning in which a fictionalised version of Yvonne Aubique appears as Eve Aubique.

Sir William Orpen died in Kensington 1931, possibly from complications arising from syphillis, and at the time was probably the most famous artist in Britain.

Flexible Venus 2: Kristine Winder

2011-12-19T16:33:00.000Z

We have had quite a few messages of appreciation regarding our ballet dancer post so, encouraged by S in Vancouver, we will be putting more of these ladies up over the next few weeks.

In fact we had a Skype video call from S only two nights ago where she had put on a blue leotard and legwarmers and gave us an impressive stretch routine across cyberspace. She had drunk nearly a bottle of Quail's Gate Dry Reisling earlier so was particularly flexible. Most diverting!

So what more appropriate subject for our next dancer than the lovely Kristine Winder from Vancouver who appeared as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in October 1977.

Her original pictorial contained four ballet pictures but we have tracked down some more including some different shots which appeared in French Playboy.

Kristine had spent seventeen years doing up to five hours dance training a day but given the then lack of artistic opportunity in the British Columbia city (it's still a bit light on classical arts compared with Toronto and Montreal - the Vancouver Art Gallery collection is pitiful, for example) she ended up as a receptionist.

She still looked nicely limber when she posed, at the age of 21, for the magazine. It's not possible to find out who took these dance photos as her pictorial had no less than four photographers: Mario Casilli (centrefold), Arny Freytag, Ken Honey and Ken Marcus.

The whole sequence is really a paean to the erotic charge of legwarmers, which work visually for exactly the same reason as stockings do but have the extra tactile quality of ribbed wool.

At 5'6" Kristine would have been rather tall for a ballerina and her 34-24-34 figure would have been rather curvier than the norm but Triple P thinks she had perfect proportions and looks superb in these pictures.

Legwarmers can have a truncating effect on the limbs but Kristine had such long legs that she still manages to look elegant in hers.

Usually Playboy used their Playmates' real names but Kristine Winder is a pseudonym as she didn't want her father to find out she had posed for the magazine. Unfortunately he did, as a number of crank, heavy breathing calls were made to people called Winder in Vancouver, trying to seek her out, and the press got hold of the story.

Sadly, Playboy reported in this year's June edition that Kristine had died earlier this year at the comparatively young age of 57. We are happy to celebrate her loveliness and dance-schooled elegance here.

Venus by Request: Béatrice Chatelier

2011-12-18T17:52:00.001Z

Béatrice from Cavalier December 1971

We have had a request for more pictures of the current Centrefold of the Week. This picture is from her appearance in Cavalier magazine from exactly forty years ago.

The person making the request assumed her name was a pseudonym but, in fact, Béatrice Chatelier is her real name. She was born in the Gironde, in France, in 1951, the daughter of a vineyard proprieter, and was an actress from the late sixties until the early eighties, appearing in nine films as well as on stage.

Here is Béatrice in Les Charlots Fonts l'Espagne (1972) a film about a pop group visiting Spain where her character was called, appropriately, Sublime.

As a teenager she went to Paris and met French record producer Eddie Barclay, famous for his work with Charles Aznovour, and they got married although he was fifty and she was nineteen.

Not surprisingly the marriage didn't last very long. Barclay went on to be married nine times. She went on to marry French actor Guy Marchand who was only fourteen years older than her.

In April 1972 she appeared in a brief but effective pictorial in the French Lui magazine.

You can say what you like about France and the French (and we are not the best of friends this week) but the country does have this ability to produce gorgeous starlet after gorgeous starlet and for that we should be grateful.

Non-Centrefold Venus of the Month 3: Cecilia Stanley, November 1973

2011-12-17T14:11:00.000Z

S in Vancouver (or actually Whistler at present) has berated us for not posting a non-centrefold of the month for November. Oh dear and now its nearly the end of December. The stress, the stress!

We are conscious that rather more than usual of our recent posts feature young ladies from seventies mens' magazines rather than drawing on the full specturm of female loveliness since the dawn of time, which is what this blog is supposed to be about.

Art posts will have to wait a little longer, however, as here we present Cecilia Stanley from UK Penthouse Volume 8 no 8 (November 1973) photographed by Geoff Howes. Penthouse's UK covers were much more...er...upfront than the US editions in this period.

This one's all a bit French country farmhouse with Cecilia looking like she is living in a gypsy caravan parked in the field behind the house and she has just popped in for some peaches and a bottle of Monbazillac. Maybe she is an artists model, which is why she wafts around not wearing much as the great artist prepares another canvas. We would certainly like to get her to pose for a few charcoal drawings.

Its a short pictorial at only six pages and, unusually the pictures are mostly full page which gives them a good impact. A nice limited palette of creams browns and beiges too.

The text accompanying the article claims she is 35-23-35 (probably), eighteen (possibly) and comes from Shepperton, Middlesex (unlikely). Shepperton is the next village to where Triple P was brought up and whilst it does feature the major film studios (Triple P ran into Sigourney Weaver there once) we have never seen a girl who even looks remotely as attractive as Cecilia. Although there was "healthy girl", a splendidly buxom blonde with a red school sweater who used to get the same bus to Shepperton station when we were at school. She was rather fine.

Cecilia's pictorial didn't appear in Penthouse's US edition at that time but, surprisingly, she appeared in a pictorial using pictures shot at the same time, but with different photos, in the July 1975 edition.

Usually pictorials would be shown pretty much as they were in each edition (with the exception of some images being censored in the UK version in the mid-seventies) so this is quite an unusual example as virtually all the pictures were different.

The difference between this pictorial and the earlier UK one is that this one features some photos shot outside. We hope it was warmer than it looks.

There is rather more gentle pussy caressing than you would have got in the magazine back in 1973 whereas in 1975 it had almost become de rigeur. This is a lovely mid-seventies Penthouse voyeuristic shot of a young lady caught in the middle of her own intimate reverie (as they would probably have said).

This one is rather more than her with her fingers just resting on her groin but it retains the dreamy sensuality of the other photos despite being more sexually aggressive.

This is just the right sort of outfit to be floating around the fields of the South of France in.

Finally, we go inside to where the UK issue shots were taken. The hippy scarf doesn't feature quite so much as by 1975 it would have looked a little dated.

In the text accompanying the US edition pictorial she is described as twenty; which is what she would have been if she had been eighteen in 1973. However she would still have been eighteen when the pictures were taken so why not just call her eighteen? Strange.

The final shot is a mirror image of the pose seen in her UK issue; the only picture from both editions to appear in both magazines. Although, actually, they are not quite the same picture.

So, we like dreamy Cecilia (or "Sissy") as the US edition called her and hope S does too!

Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 7-1975 part 3

2011-12-14T22:49:00.001Z

The last quarter of 1975 was a key one in The Pubic Wars as Playboy continued to try to match Penthouse's push to the more explicit. Oui magazine, which despite being designed by co-owners Playboy to be a more explicit rival to Penthouse, had been slow to take up the challenge. However by the end of 1975 this had started to change as its very nude cover showed.

Certainly showing more than other Oui girls was that month's centrefold "Miss Vicki" whose centrefold was easily as explicit as anything that Penthouse had come up so far. This was all the more surprising as Miss Vicki was not a professional model but was more a "celebrity" model. Her claim to fame being that she had been married to falsetto warbler Tiny Tim. Miss Vicky (real name Victoria May Budinger) was just seventeen when she married 35 year old Tim (real name Herbert Khaury) live on the Tonight Show on December 17th 1969. She had been a fan and met him at an autograph signing. She confessed that they didn't have sex for six months after the marriage but eventually she bore him a son, Tulip, named after his most famous song, Tiptoe through the Tulips, one of the true horrors of the sixties music business. Eventually she left Tiny Tim for his former manager.

Up until now Oui's couples pictorials had tended towards boy/girl rather then the increasingly risque girl/girl sets being showcased in Penthouse. However, in a sequel to their December 1973 pictorial they bought back "Aunt Nancy", this time set on seducing her niece rather than her nephew. In truth, apart from a little mild undressing, the piece was hardly brimming with sapphic passion and the younger girl looks bored throughout.

What a contrast to Playboy's girl/girl feature from the same month. The October cover really caused a storm with an overtly lesbian themed and nipple baring picture that highlighted J Frederick Smiths photo pictorial, Sappho, within. Even Penthouse or Hustler hadn't put two embracing women on the cover

The pictures in the feature were also stronger than any of Penthouse's girl/girl sets to date. Smith had originally started as a painter. He painted pin-up girls for Esquire during World War 2 and then, in 1956 he was given a photo assignment for Vogue. He never looked back and shot for the top magazines and advertisements for well known companies.

Smith's pictures threw out the coy posturings of Playboy's (and indeed Penthouse's) girl/girl sets and replaced them with passionate clinches and real kissing. There were no naked girls in a dorm or wafting around meadows here. Smith's subjects looked like real women who had real sex with each other. The quotes from Sappho made it all art, of course.

Whilst some readers wrote in praising the "tasteful", "artistic and erotic" pictorial one grumpy reader was not impressed at all. "I think your pictorial Sappho is in very poor taste. It's offensive, stupid and immature! This is supposed to be a men's magazine! Why must we be subjected to the immoral acts of those stupid girls? Why don't you leave such material to magazines that cater for homosexuals?" Oh dear!

The main claim to fame of that month's Playmate, Jill de Vries, was that her centrefold was the first one to have the Playmate's signature printed on it.

Unusually, Jill has her fingers on her pussy in the centrefold and, in fact, it would be the most pussy-stroking Playmate pictorial to date with Jill's fingers straying to her nether reasons in no less than five shots.

Her raciest pose however was this one where she has one hand on her pussy and the fingers of the other hand sliding between her buttocks.

Over at Penthouse their October Pet was voluptuous Swede Anne Peters who showed her prominent labia in several shots by Jeff Dunas.

There was still some nervousness about such explicit shots in the centrefold, however, and Anne's nether regions were blurred for this.

There was no blurring in the pictures by Bob Guccione of the ninth Pet of the Year, Anneka de Lorenzo. Indeed, Miss de Lorenzo also had prominent labia but Guccione showed them off more than for any previous girl in the magazine. Although there was a slight amount of soft focus it was not enough to disguise the fact that after a year of teasing pussy shots Guccione got Anneka to show everything, including, for the first time for a Penthouse Pet, her anus.

Anneka was also shown in a couple of pussy stroking shots making hers the raciest and most explicit Penthouse pictorial to date. Since being Pet of the Month Anneka had taken acting lessons and appeared in bit parts in three movies: The Rape Squad, Mama’s Dirty Girls and The Centrefold Girls.

Anneka (right) with Lori Wagner in Caligula

Guccione told Anneka about his planned film, Caligula and offered her the part of Caesonia. However, in the spring of 1976 she heard that Helen Mirren had been given the part and her new role as Messalina was reduced to a non speaking one. She flew to Rome in 1976 to begin work on the film, one of only a few Pets to appeare in the mainstream part of the filming rather than just the hardcore inserts Guccione secretly filmed later.

Guccione directs Wagner (standing) and de Lorenzo (on the bed) in Caligual's notorious lesbian love scene

The result: Anneka (right) tongues out Lori

One extra scene that Guccione shot for Caligula, in an attempt to sex it up, was a lesbian scene between Anneka and her friend Lori Wagner. The two knew that they had to do a sex scene and decided that a girl/girl one would be easier as they had become friends on the shoot. The scene was notorious at the time for being the most explicit lesbian scene in a conventional motion picture although most of it was cut in the theatrical cut of the final film.

Anneka front and centre in the most infamous still from Caligula

Her most notorious scene, however, was in the hardcore Imperial Bordello orgy sequence that Guccione also shot as an extra and without director Tinto Brass's knowledge. This featured a dozen other Pets in action but it is Anneka's fellation of an Anglo-Italian extra that was the centrepiece of the scene.

French poster for Messalina, Messalina featuring Anneka

Anneka worked hard promoting Caligula for Penthouse, and even starrred in the low budget Messalina, Messalina which used the sets of Caligula, but she found that the notoriety of the film counted against her getting more convetional acting work. Eventually her relationship with Guccione and Penthouse soured to the extent that she took them to court in 1990 accusing Guccione, essentially, of bullying her into her hardcore scenes in Caligula. Although she was awarded $4 million damages Guccione later successfully appealed the award and celebrated by publishing stills from her lesbian scene in Caligula in Penthouse. Tragically, she died early this year in mysterious circumstances.

Gallery was also going for bold nipple shots on its cover as well. Having started out as a very much a Playboy clone it was starting to move closer to Penthouse territory by the end of 1975.

Their girl Debbie not only showed off her pussy but also flashed her anus as well, in their October issue.

The cover of November's Playboy would turn out to be its most controversail picture for a long time and had a critical effect on the direction of the Pubic Wars. Highlighting the magazine's annual review of sexy cinema Phillip Dixon's picture of Patricia Margot McLaine, who would go on to be Playmate of the month in June 1976, attracted almost universal condemnation even from within the Playboy organisation itself. Newsweek described her as a "young cineaste who, to give her the benefit of the doubt, seems to be plumbing the depths of her bikini panties for a stray kernel of popcorn." More important than press distaste was the outrage from Playboy's advertisers. Playboy's director of advertising told Hefner that $40 million in advertising was at risk if Playboy continued its fight with its more explicit competitors. It was the turning point for Hefner. That same month he told an editorial committee that Playboy had lost sight of what it was meant to be and that the magazine should be made a class act again. "Playboy opts for retreat in the Pubic Wars" said the headline in the Los Angeles Times on December 3rd that year.

Candy gives it some tail

Playboy's November Playmate was a big breasted throwback to the less raunchy days of the early seventies. She didn't stroke her groin or display her labia. However, that issue the magazine had one of it's regular pictorials featuring Bunnies from its clubs. In the past these had often been at the forefront of what Playboy felt able to show and the Chicago club's Candy Collins was no exception, displaying a very visible perineum. It looked like anuses were going to be the next battlefront in the Pubic Wars. Candy would go on to be Miss December 1979, as the rather more refined Candace, with a selection of far less racy shots.

Naomi has a feel

In the same feature, Playboy had New York bunny Naomi Lee stroking her pussy and the Sex in Cinema feature was full of pictures of couples photographed having cinematic sex. In retrospect, this issue is seen as the official end of the Pubic Wars but in reality Playboy did not go back to the way it had been five years before. The world had moved on and the magazine would continue to be more explicit about sexual matters than it had been in the early seventies. Its pictorials, too, did not see an immediate dialling down of the more explicit approach, as we shall see in due course.

Oui was not really any racier than Playboy at this point, even though that was supposed to have been the purpose of the magazine.

One of their young ladies, Heloise, displayed herself in a very soft-focus Penthouse style way but it was a long way behind what Penthouse, Hustler and increasing numbers of the other magazines were showing in the second half of 1975.

Oui did have a pictorial which jumped on the masturbation bandwagon. The pictures featured a lady known as Gillian and described her increasing excitement as she journeyed on a train to meet her boyfriend. In reality the pictures were rather mild compared with what else was starting to be shown and most of the heat came from the rather clever writing which used allusion and innuendo rather than explicit description.

Gillian for Page 3

The very lovely lady in the pictorial was none other than top UK glamour model and Page 3 girl Gillian Duxbury who, under the name Billie Deane, had been Penthouse Pet of the Month for March 1972.

Penthouse's November issue continued along the path of ever more explicit pictures. Non-Pet of the month, Canadian model, Debbie was photographed by Allan Neumann without all the fussy soft focus.

Debbie displays

A girl with a rather more Playboy like figure (38-24-36) her thumb and fingers perfectly frame her labia which are shown in crisp, non-diffuse detail in a full page picture.

Texan Pet of the Month Bonnie Dee Wilson was photographed by Bob Guccione in slight soft focus. The pictorial included Penthouse's most explicit pussy from the rear shot so far. Wilson was Guccione's mistress at this time and was far from a usual choice for Pet of the Month, being a comparatively old twenty eight and a mother.

Another barrier breaking picture of Bonnie Dee was this small photo which took up about an eighth of a a page. Penthouse often went for small pictures (such as Stephanie McLean's first pubic picture) if they were pushing at a barrier, presumably on the basis that no one in authority would notice it. Here Bonnie Dee gives us Penthouse's first open vagina shot.

Her centrefold picture wasn't quite as revealing but, given that the previous month's Pet, Anne Peters, had had her labia airbrushed out it was a bold statement by Penthouse as to where they were going.

There was, arguably, even more explicit naughtiness going on with that month's "love set", which were becoming an increasing feature of the magazine. Before 1975 Penthouse had only had two boy/girl pictorials; one each in 1972 and 1973. However in 1975 they would eventually have four including this one, Love in the Afternoon photographed in the English West Country by Jeff Dunas and Denis Scott.

This may well have been a case of Penthouse responding to Oui's use of couples pictorials; which had been controversial in the latter magazine. Guccione, however, had been shooting couples pictorials for its womens' magazine Viva since 1973. What was remarkable about this one, and in complete contrast to Playboy's efforts in this area, was the amount of times the male model's penis was shown.

For the first time in this pictorial, as well, it is clear that he is semi-erect in a couple of the shots as can be seen when comparing his flaccid state in the first of the three pictures here with the other two. The one where the girl has her breast pressed against his member is easily the most explicit boy/girl shot to have appeared in the magazine to date.

Ironically, given that Hugh Hefner had offcially capitulated in the Pubic Wars, December's Playboy was one of their raciest issues to date. Although Playmate Nanci le Brandi's labia were subtley blurred in what would otherwise have been a couple of radical spread legged shots elsewhere in the magazine it was sex, sex, sex all the way in that month's pictorials.

Playboy had one of their "comedy" pictorials in a send up of National Geographic called, naturally, National Pornographic which featured these bonking explorers.

Frigging and flashing in Sex Stars

Their annual Sex Stars review had a number of ladies flashing their labia, some very graphic, for Playboy, female masturbation and, even one gentleman flashing his cock.

Another of their five pictorials that month came from the set of the new erotic film the Story of O. This inlcuded several shots of people having sex as well as this close up of Corrine Clery's labia ring.

Their raunchiest pictorial, however, was called Peep Show and was credited to two photographers: Francois Robert and Robert Keeling. This was by far the raciest of Playboy's couples pictorials and, perhaps, shows the way that they might have gone if they had decided to keep competing with Penthouse. On the first two pages alone we get voyeurism, masturbation, rear entry sex and pussy touching.

Next they present some threesome action with some lesbian breast kissing and more rear entry thrown in.

In a first and only time for Playboy they include, albeit indistinctly, a glimpse of the man's penis in one of their couples sets.

Finally, they finish up with some good old lesbian play. The dark haired girl is May 1975 Playmate Bridgett Rollins, who sadly died in February 2011. In future Playboy would largely leave the couples pictorials to others and this would very much be their high (or low if you were an advertiser) watermark as far as explicitness went.

British-owned Club finished its first year in the US with a centrefold model, also featured on the cover, who certainly demonstrated the new fashion of faux masturbation.

Kerry Turner had her finger on the button in several pictures in her pictorial. This wasn't just a girl with her hand on her pussy the implication was that the finger was actually delving into it.

Genesis was just finishing its third year of publication and went or this rather self-consciously raunchy cover.

Their girls were a bit more homely than those in Playboy and Penthouse and there was only one slight flash of Candy, who also looks rather older than the girls from the other magazines.

Penthouse often used its December issue to push the boundaries of the acceptable a little and 1975's edition was no exception.

Yum yum!

First off, they had a girl/girl set photographed by Earl Miller called Mirror Image which was considerably more passionate in its depiction of lesbian action than any of Penthouse's previous, somewhat coy, efforts. This went further than Playboy's earlier Sappho pictorial by having, in one picture, one girl literally sitting on the other's face while in another, which was cut from the UK edition, one girl has her mouth on the other's pussy in their first explicit rug munching shot.

December's Pet of the Month was the particularly beautiful Susan Waide. After a rather modest pictorial Penthouse presented her in their clearest genital centrefold to date. No soft focus, no dark shadows just the lovely Susan and her lovely cunt. These Penthouse pictures featuring their models labia, from the last few months of 1975, which were probably being influenced by Larry Flynt's Hustler (whatever Guccione subsequently claimed about being the innovator in the protrayal of women's genitals), had a significant effect on the portrayal of naked women in men's magazines. As we have seen in previous postings photographers had to go to great lengths to avoid the portrayal of womens' pubic hair for magazines in the fifties and sixties (other then the small circulation "specialist" titles). When this became accepatable they had to avoid glimpses of the models' labia being seen and this often necessitated doctoring the pictures. Penthouse's introduction of spread legged poses made this even more difficult and, as we have seen, in 1975 they stopped disguising their girl's genitals. However, there is a big difference between showing what would be normally visible and making it the sole focus of the image. This essentially is what would happen over the next two years as the vulva bcame the main focus for the pictures. In some cases, the rest of the girl would become irrelevant as magazines competed to see how far they could get their models to display themselves. There is no doubt that a lot of artistry in the pictures disappeared and Playboy's argument that they wanted to show pictures of pretty naked women not get into a genital displaying competition seems quite right. What detracts from Playboy's argument, though, is that they continued to use the spread legged poses; it'sjust that they used a lot of shadow to disguise the "offending" (to advertisers) area instead. In fact Penthouse would continue to take a more artistic approach compared with some of its more down-market competion (both in the US and the UK) whilst still putting in increasingly graphic genital shots.

Penthouse's final pictorial of 1975 was notable for being their first period-set "love set". Later, period, fantasy and science fiction themed pictorials would be quite common in the magazine but this one, set in the Deep South in the nineteenth century was the first. It had period clothes and interiors and even quite a clever little story. Called The Duel it featured a 22 year old Lori Wagner (Anneka di Lorenzo's Caligula bedmate) who had first featured in the magazine in May that year under the name octavia Corriell. Her masturbation shots, above, were too strong for the UK edition of the magazine which doctored them.

Surprisingly, the UK edition did allow this fairly bold male full-frontal; with Octavia's wrist actually in contact with the gentleman's member. The most "interactive" penis couples shot so far in the magazine.

Penthouse's year end couples set was nothing compared with Hustler's, however. Hustler's future was secure, after its Jackie Onassis shots, which made Larry Flynt a millionaire, and was grossing over $500,000 an issue in 1975. However, they had nothing like the advertising revenue of Penthouse and Playboy (which is how they could get away with such outrageous content) so on the cover they took the unusual step of announcing a price rise for the magazine.

Their couples set, Butch and his Georgia Peach, would have an undreamed of effect on Flynt and his empire. Featuring Butch Williams and a young stripper called Deborah Clearbranch, Hustler would, as a result of Mr Williams' impressive anatomy, announce a prize for any man who could prove he was as well endowed. No one ever won.

Deborah in Penthouse June 1974

Nineteen at the time of this shoot, Clearbranch was born and brought up in Georgia but left college to move to California, where she became a topless go-go dancer whilst trying to break into movies. She also did some nude modelling and, as a seventeen year old, had appeared in Penthouse in June 1974.

Deborah/Desireé in action

Having appeared in a few parts in minor mainstream movies Clearbranch went on to be a popular actress in hardcore films in the late seventies and early eightes under the name Desireé Cousteau.

Considering the nervousness about shots of penises in the other major magazines this pictorial was really more about Mr Williams member than Deborah's perky little body. Nevertheless, this wasn't the real source of the many objections to the pictorial. Complaints flooded in, particularly from the South, because he was black and she was white. Playboy had had similar problems when it published a picture of a naked black man with a white girl.

One man who saw the photos got particularly incensed. Joseph Franklin later said "It just showed a black male and a white female together and when I closed up (the magazine) I just thought to myself I'm gonna kill (Flynt)." "I just got very incensed because of photos that they published in Hustler, you know, mixed race, you know, white women with black men so this made me sick, you know, grossed me out and still does." In June 1978 Larry Flynt and his lawyer were leaving a courthouse in Georgia when they were gunnned down by shots from a .44 calibre rifle, leaving Flynt a paraplegic. No one was caught at the time but racist serial killer Franklin admitted to the crime subsequently. He has not been tried for it because he is already serving life imprisonment for other murders.

Flynt is taken to hospital in Georgia

All this was in the future for Flynt and his main aim for 1976 was to try to close the gap on Penthouse. So although Guccione's Pubic War with Playboy was officially over he couldn't rest on his laurels and so 1976 would see more barrier pushing. 1976 would be America's Bicentennial but it would also be the year of the pussy in mens' magazines.

Flexible Venus 1: Dancer in a lilac tutu

2011-12-11T20:52:00.001Z

Agent Triple P would never claim to be an aficionado of ballet, although he has attended a fair few in the company of ballet-loving ladies. We have seen ballet in London, Berlin, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Vienna, Toronto, Hanoi and probably a few other places we have forgotten about.

Whilst Triple P can understand the appeal of ballet he remembers being rather surprised, on attending his first performance, at the amount of noise the dancers made when thumping hard on to the stage. It took something away from the experience, which is why we think it works better on TV where you just get the music and no thumping!

Although we haven't gone out with any dancers per se we have known some who have had dance training (quite a lot in several cases) and the thought of dancers has always held a certain erotic frisson for Triple P. There are four things Triple P finds particularly alluring about dancers: the toned legs and slender figures (we appreciate a skinny girl), the clothing, the physical poise and, last but by no means least, the demonstrable flexibility.

One girl we knew did regular jazz and tap classes to keep in shape and her legs, although pleasingly soft to the touch had this iron tone beneath the surface like silk riding over tungsten carbide. Stroking her legs was a true pleasure, especially when she flexed her muscles and you could feel her underlying strength.

There are two attractive aspects of dance dress. Firstly, the performance wear, which for classical ballet features that strangely attractive garment the tutu. This Russian dancer is wearing a fetching lilac example of the now almost ubiquitous Balanchine/Karinska Tutu whose softer profile was, nevertheless, radical when it first appeared in 1950 as an alternative to the stiffer wired "pancake" tutu. The success of the tutu, which on reflection is, of course, an utterly ridiculous garment, relies on the emphasis it gives to the dancer's legs.

Dance practice wear tends to be an artfully created melange of all sorts of contrasting pieces of clothing which, nevertheless, needs to allow full movement whilst keeping the legs warm. One of Triple P's lady friends had got the wearing of legwarmers, skirts, vests, short cardigans and scarfs down to a fine art. There were so many items of clothing but all so skimpy that they barely made a costume in total. Which, of course, is the real trick.

Properly trained dancers are usually easy to identify by the way they move, hold their bodies and even the way they stand. Girls who habitually stand with their feet in a "T" position have probably had a lot of ballet training. Triple P finds this almost unconscious elegance very appealing.

This young lady has had classical training as she is able to go en pointe a technique which requires literally years of practice starting at the barre and great muscular strength (and not just in the legs).

Although the idea is to extend the line of the leg and make the feet look elegant in reality most ballet dancers have terrible feet; the rigours of going en pointe giving them calluses, bleeding toenails, bunions, bursitis and many other nasty ailments. You have to suffer for art!

This sequence of pictures was recently sent to us by our particular friend S with whom we have been to several ballets in Canada. A young lady who did a lot of ballet as a youngster she well knows the effort needed to look effortless!

Triple P confesses that every time he sees an attractive ballerina in a tutu his mind always turns to exciting thoughts of flexibility and minimal ballet clothes so this set of photos is most welcome!

Female dancers' flexibility is their most obvious source of erotic appeal, as our Russian girl exemplifies in this final splendid study, but we will look at flexibility and the erotic shortly.

Venus Relieved: an unexpected book

2011-12-10T00:07:00.000Z

With Christmas approaching the bookshops in London are getting what they hope will be their Christmas best sellers in stock. Waterstones, our major bookstore chain, usually has a small selection of slightly racy photography books in stock which it often augments with a few extras at this time of the year. The staples include the pictorial books by Dita von Teese, compendiums such as the Mammoth Book of Erotic Women, the Pirelli calendar book, Dian Hanson's "Big Book of..." series etc. All reasonably mainstream as such books go.

Triple P was just in the Waterstones branch on Trafalgar Sqaure and was looking in the art and photography sections, as he often does. They had most of the above mentioned books but they also had two copies of a book called Pissy Pussy Girls which we immediately found very ungrammatical. Inside, surprisingly and not surpisingly at the same time, were a series of pictures by a photographer called Gordon Denman of, well, girls pissing. The picture below, which is about the least graphic in the book, reminded me of an incident with S from Vancouver many years ago when she just failed to get her trousers off in time in our hotel bathroom, having been trying to escape for some time from an over zealous conversationalist at a work reception and having consumed far too much Granville Island beer. Doubled up in agony in the lift of the Pan Pacific in Vancouver, after we eventually escaped, we really thought, as we unlocked the door to Triple P's room that we had made it. Alas all she needed was another five seconds!

Now this is not a particularly unusual fetish, we know several young ladies (S included) who enjoy spraying fun, but what was unusual was finding such an explicit book in such a mainstream shop; and two copies as well! Triple P was surprised, to say the least. Denman is better known for his arty books of black and white photographs of real couples having sex but this was a full colour opus. I wonder how many Waterstones (appropriately!) will sell for Christmas?

Venus with a Snake 12: Serpieri drawing

2011-12-08T08:52:00.000Z

This drawing by Serpieri equally falls into our Venus from the Rear category. Having a Cobra rather than the more traditional python interacting with the young lady makes a change. Initially we thought that the snake's body looked far too long but, in fact, a King Cobra can grow to over twelve feet in length. One, which was kept in London Zoo until World War Two, grew to over eighteen feet in length.

The lady seems to be enjoying the Cobra's caress and doesn't seem concerned by its venom. Although the King Cobra's venom is comparatively weak it delivers so much (5cl) in one bite that it can kill a human.

Centrefold Venus of the Month 30: Suzanne (Linda Lusardi), November 1977

2011-11-29T16:30:00.000Z

For a very long time Miss Lusardi has been the most popular search on Venus Observations. We first posted her February 1977 pictorial from Mayfair in February of last year and, since then, she has regularly topped the list of most viewed post. Last month, for example, she accounted for no less than 20% of all the search results for this blog but then when we Googled her today our Venus Observations entry was the third one on the list.

Fiesta November 1977

What better way of celebrating our thirtieth Centrefold of the Month than revisiting her and presenting her notorious Fiesta set from November 1977.

Fiesta, October 1977

Oddly, Linda didn't appear on the cover of the November issue but had, in a picture taken in the session that would feature in November, on the October cover.

Not unusually, Linda appeared under another name, Suzanne, which, perhaps was what led her to try and deny she had ever posed for such an explicit set in the future.

There are quite a few pictures from this set on the web but most of them are of poor quality. We have done our own scans, as usual, to ensure we have nice crisp pictures (given the limits of the far from quality printing in the magazine itself).

The pictures were shot by Allan Johns about whom we could discover absolutely nothing at all!

Eschewing the clothed shots that were still being used in Penthouse, for example, at the time Johns really only uses Lusardi's red dress to add a flash of colour to what is, in fact, a pictorial with a very limited colour palette.

What she does keep on, in every shot, are her stockings, which have an enticing lace top.

The pictorial only utilises one setting which features a large round chair which is dressed up in several ways.

A little more colour is introduced through the use of a green feather boa and some apricot covered, rather slimy-looking, seventies sheets.

The overall colour of the pictorial is predominantly black and tan, however, the overall lack of fussiness focussing us very clearly on Miss Lusardi's teenage form.

It was only really in 1976 that UK mens' magazines stopped retouching their pictures to avoid the models' labia showing. By 1977, when this pictorial was shot, not only were genitals not hidden but had become the focus of the pictorials and this is certainly the case with Linda's pictorial here.

There is no Penthouse style soft-focus or dreamily romantic portraits or clothed shots here, just Linda displaying her (rather splendid) pussy. This is the last of the pictures from the November 1977 pictorial and she never did such explicit shots again.

This picture is very similar (but flipped) to her Fiesta October 1977 cover.

Other pictures from this shoot popped up in a number of places afterwards. We did not scan these pictures so the quality is variable but we are nothing if not a completist so include them here starting with a set featuring the red dress and the white chair.

The rest feature the dreaded apricot sheet, starting with these ones of Linda from the rear.

Since we posted the original Mayfair set of her back in February last year we actually met her briefly at an event in London; she seemed rather charming we thought and still looked very good.

Someone left a comnent to the effect, on our earlier post, that they felt she had rather demeaned herself with these pictures, given that they appeared after she had made her first appearance as a Page 3 girl. That is a much larger debate, outside the remit of this post, to do with questions of taste and the artistic aesthetic. Triple P tends to be of the opinion, as someone once wrote in Men Only at about this time, that "why can't a pretty girl have a pretty cunt?" Something Miss Lusardi certainly displays rather well.

Our only negative thought on this pictorial is that Linda has a particularly dazzling smile (which we are sure is the main reason - after the obvious two - for her overwhelming popularity as a Page 3 girl) so it is a pity to see her looking so glum in this set.

Showgirl Venuses 1: Folies Bergere by Alain Aslan

2011-11-27T10:12:00.004Z

Agent Triple P appreciates a good showgirl, those be-sequinned, feather-plumed examples of statuesque loveliness that decorate the stages of Paris, Las Vegas and elsewhere, bringing glamour and style (as well as the ability to support often very big headresses) to brighten our lives.

What better way to start this series than with two examples by French artist Alain Aslan for the Folies Bergère. This famous Parisian music hall was founded in 1869 with a design based on the Alhambra in London. Unlike the Alhambra, which was demolished in 1936 to make way for the famous Odeon Leicester Square cinema, the Folies Bergère still exists and still puts on shows.

Its future, however, was not looking so bright back in 1974 when former Folies showgirl Hélène Martini took over the direction of the place and ensured its continuation to the present day. The fact that these posters have Martini's name on them helps us to date them. We believe that at least one, if not both, are from 1977.

Alain Aslan (b 1930) is probably France's greatest pin-up artist famous not only for his paintings for Lui and Oui magazines but also his sculptures of French national icons. Currently living and working in Quebec, Canada, we will look at his work more extensively in the future.

One interesting conceit of these pictures is that whilst the feathers immediately say "Showgirl" they are, in fact, just an abstracted background design and not part of her costume.

Calendar Venus: Eve from 1938

2011-11-23T08:19:00.000Z

Quite often we are struck by an image for its immediate impact despite not knowing anything of its origins and this is the case with "Eve" here. We know it dates from 1938 and a little research has shown that it originated from the Joseph C Hoover and Sons print publishers company of Philadelphia (a fine city where Triple P spent an enjoyable week a couple of years ago). The name on the piece, VP Wright, under the copyright notice, would not be the artist but the employee of the company who registered the image for copyright purposes.

Joseph Hoover was actually a native American and started out as a picture framer in Philadelphia in 1856. Soon he was producing prints, initially for other publishers. In 1885 he set up a complete printing plant and by the end of the century was producing nearly three quarters of a million prints a year. By the thirties they were producing calendars including ones featuring pin ups such as this.

Eve is an elegant composition with the pose, chair, abstracted background and colouring typical of late Art Deco. The use of chiaroscuro is unusual in pin-up pictures of the time but here is used beautifully to define the woman's form.

An altogether splendid image!

Centrefold Venus of the Month: Review

2011-11-22T08:21:00.001Z

Genesis, November 1973

We still get comments on previous Centrefolds of the Month and have had a lot of comments on old posts this month, so we thought it would be interesting (to us at least) to look at the source of the 29 Centrefolds of the month we have had so far; perhaps to inform the decisions we will take on what to have for the next half dozen or so. We offer a selection of November centrefold girls we haven't shown before as decoration.

Playboy, November 1958

Actually, we have already decided on this month's entry (time is running out, though!) and some for the next few months but still have some leeway for other months into 2012.

Penthouse, November 1969

We confess to having three types of Centrefold of the Month posts. Firstly, there is a major post on a young lady who we particularly appreciate. Into this category we can put Carol Augustine, for example.

Knave, November 1983

Secondly, we have those ladies who have gone on to be rather more than just centrefold models and have a more interesting story attached to them. A good example of this is Britt (Christina) Lindberg.

Mayfair, November 1990

Finally, we have those ladies who are chosen precisely because they may have had limited, or even only one, appearances in mens' magazines (such as Tamara Santerra) and so it is possible to just feature their centrefold pictorial without having to do lots of research on them and find other pictures. If you see one of these it means that Triple P has had a particularly busy month!

Fiesta, November 1985

Of course there will be all sorts of overlap where we get a centrefold we appreciate who also has an interesting story (such as Henriette Allais). We have avoided the production of a Venn diagram!

Chic, November 1981

We have had a quick look at two factors, however: which magazine the girl's centrefold comes from and from which decade it appeared in.

Looking at the magazine source first, we can see that Penthouse has provided the majority of our featured centrefolds to date so, perhaps, we need to widen our selection a little bit in the coming months. Twenty out of twenty-nine centrefolds come from Penthouse and Playboy.

As regards date well over half of our centrefolds have come from the nineteen seventies with around 25% from the sixties. None from the nineties or tens yet. We tend to be influenced, of course, by those we remember from the magazines at the time and also the fact that, in many ways, the seventies were the high point of mens magazines in many ways.

Men Only, November 1984

Nevertheless, we should feature more from the eighties, which were nearly as good and where we also had a large number of magazines from that decade. These were partly our own purchases but also were gifts from what would now be termed a bi-curious girlfriend whose choice in lingerie seemed very influenced by the boudoir look of the eighties.

Hustler, November 1979

When we did our first Centrefold of the Month posts we did not, as we did later, include every picture from their original pictorial or add pictures we discovered from other sources, so we are going back and remedying this gradually.

Club, November 1977

Once this is done they will all be nicely indexed down the right hand side of the page. Those entries that are now "complete" will have an identifying number next to them.

Playboy, November 2005

Although they are usually the most time-consuming posts we now do (the recent one on the Collinson twins took five weeks to assemble) they also continue to be, along with our Pubic Wars posts, the most popular on the blog so it is only right that the old ones are brought up to the same quality level as the new ones.

Venus Passing: Anneka Di Lorenzo

2011-11-13T09:57:00.002Z

Triple P was sad to hear of the death of one of his favourite Penthouse Pets from the seventies Anneka Di Lorenzo. Although she died in January this year the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has only recently (late last month) launched an appeal for information about her death.

Anneka Vasta

The fifty-eight year old, now known as Anneka Vasta, was found drowned on a beach with a broken neck and back close to Camp Pendleton in San Diego. Investigators had trouble identifying her as her body was so youthful they initially thought that she was a teenager. Her car was found on top of some sixty foot cliffs a mile away, parked after she had driven down from Los Angeles where she lived. The authorities do not have enough evidence to tell whether it was suicide (there were cuts on her wrists consistent with a half-hearted suicide attempt) or foul play.

She had been mentally fragile for some years, according to her sister, but her family do not believe she would actually have committed suicide and are worried that someone preyed on the friendly and trusting woman.

Anneka doing publicity work for Caligula in 1980

Anneka was born Marjorie Lee Thoreson in St Paul, Minnesota on August 25th 1952. She left school at the age of 14 and moved to California. She changed her name to Anneka Di Lorenzo and did a number of odd jobs becoming a nude dancer at a club. She saw Bob Guccione on TV and sent him some pictures of herself. He signed her up to be Penthouse Pet of the Month for September 1973 in a shoot photographed by Guccione himself in London. She became Pet of the Year for 1975 and was very visible in his film, Caligula (1979). She had small parts in other films too. Later she sued Guccione for $4 million for sexual harrasment and was awarded $4,060,000 damages but she only recived the $60,000 as Guccione appealed and won. She moved to Florida and married Philip Vasta. They divorced and she moved back to California. She leaves a daughter in her twenties.

We will do a proper appreciation of her in the future, probably as Centrefold of the Month, which won't be until next September.

The NCIS case on Anneka Vasta remains open. A sad end for such a beauty.

Centrefold of the Month and Pubic Wars Updates

2011-11-12T10:37:00.000Z

Yvonne Ekman

Like Sibelius we are an inveterate revisor of previous work so are currently re-visiting some of our earlier Centrefold Venuses of the month. These days, for our Centrefold of the Month feature, we always include every picture from the lady's pictorial but we didn't do this at the start. We will be remedying this gradually.

The first revised and extended post is for August 1967 Penthouse Pet and former Miss Denmark Yvonne Ekman.

Kathy McKinnon from Oui August 1975

Likewise, we have extensively revised one of our Pubic Wars posts for 1975; dividing what was one post into two (the second part will appear shortly). We will also be indexing all of our Pubic Wars posts (as they are the most popular on the blog) in the sidebar.

Venus from the Rear: Venus in tights

2011-11-11T10:52:00.000Z

This picture, from a lingerie pictorial in the February 1992 edition, is one of our favourite Playboy images of all time. In fact, the photograph, by Byron Newman, would probably make our list of top 50 pictures of women full stop.

It is a rare example of a picture that makes tights sexy but why else we respond to it so positively we are not sure. It is cleverly composed, with the girl's legs and rear centred over the block of blue and yet the vertical black right hand area balancing the clear area to the left of the girl. The stacked, vintage suitcases anchor the bottom of the composition whilst the girl's rear, trunk and head fill the top third, the two parts being linked by the slender legs and arm. It has a limited four colour palette with just the vivid red on the lips bringing in a dash of a bright fifth colour. The lips themselves mark the point where the edge of the black crosses the bottom of the top third of the picture. The shoes are the very definition of fuck me stilettos (as our friend SA used to call her favourite pair) but the genius is the scalloped edges of the dark part of her tights covering her rear.

Jenny: equally attractive from the front. From September 1990's World Cup pictorial

The model is Hong Kong born Jenny Szeto who had first appeared in Playboy for a pictorial themed on the World Cup in September 1990. Playboy flew Byron Newman and eleven girls to Italy for their pictorial. Where the Americans got the idea that Hong Kong was a football power we don't know! Jenny was originally a physicist before giving it up to be a model.

A slightly more revealing shot was used by Playboy in their 1992 calendar, where Jenny was Miss December.

She is our first Hong Kong Venus! Utterly irresistible!

Inspirational Venus: Ana Lima

2011-11-08T17:54:00.001Z

Druuna

In our recent piece on the Italian comic book artist Serpieri we ventured that this picture (above) of his heroine Druuna was a fine example of the Italian female rear. One of our knowledgeable readers, however, pointed out that Serpieri himself had said that he had based Druuna on a Brazilian Playboy Playmate.

Ana Lima

After some research we realised that she wasn't a Brazilian playmate from the US Playboy magazine but was a Playmate of the Month from Playboy Brazil which made the research a little more involved.

Nevertheless we tracked her down and here is Ana Lima in all her South American glory from Playboy Brazil's April 1989 issue.

Comparing the photograph and Serpieri's interpretation of it we can see just how much he has exaggerated her rear. Not by too much, however, Miss Lima's rear is quite impressive enough in real life.

Agent Triple P has never been to Brazil (although that may change in January) and, other than the large number of Brazilian women working in wine bars and restaurants in London has had little interaction with them.

We did once go to to a Brazilian model's birthday party in Milan during Fashion Week. We were taken there by our aristocratic Italian colleague M and his brother and we recall being outnumbered by models at this particular party by about seven to one. Disappointingly, despite the event taking place in an excellent restaurant, the girls literally just poked at salads, chain smoked and drank Champagne. Most of them were Brazilian and very few spoke any English or even Italian.

Agent Triple P can't stand a woman who doesn't eat properly, let alone one who chain smokes so despite the apparent interest of one of them (whose name, we are afraid, quite escapes us) we rather passed on our chance to explore her Brazilian charms more. Instead we retired back to the Hotel Principe di Savoia with an Italian marketing girl who called herself "Bay-a-tray-chay" which we thought was a remarkably exotic sounding name until she wrote it down for us and we realised it was just "Beatrice". Our Italian was still at a rather basic stage at this point!

It must be rather strange for Miss Lima to be the model for a comic book character who is often depicted getting tied up and explicitly ravished (the American versions of the comic books are often heavily censored).

We wonder whether she made any money out of being the inspiration for Serpieri's character. Almost certainly not!

Any way we will leave you with a few more of Miss Lima from her Playboy appearance.

We were talking to some Brazilian people today and there were a number of striking looking Brazilian women amongst them, so we think we might have some more Brazilian Venuses soon!