Rita Jenrette, The Girls of Kokomo, Indianaĭorothy Stratten, Miss World Gabriella Brum, Girls of the Adriatic Coast Twins: Cybil and Tricia Barnstable, Sheila and Moira Stone, Piper and Tara Perry, Lynette and Leigh Harris (or Lyn and Leigh Holiday), Jo Penney Marie Helvin, Playmate Roommates: Terri Welles, Candy Loving, and Sondra Theodore
Terri Welles, Candy Loving, Sondra Theodore government)īarbara Bach, Honky-Tonk Angels (urban cowgirls) The magazine hit the stands in April 1972, three months before Deliverance opened, and quickly sold all 1.5 million copies.Ī version of this story was published as "Vintage Beefcake" in the November 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan.Miss World 1978 Silvana Suárez, Perfect Attendants ( flight attendants)ĭorothy Stratten – Playmate of the Year (PMOY), Fellini's Feminist Fantasy (the women of City of Women)Įvelyn Guerrero, Girls of the Southwest Conferenceīeauty and Bureaucracy (women of the U.S. (If I was trying to prove something, why would I cover it up with my hand? I have very small hands.) They promised to burn the outtakes and give me the negatives. He took hundreds of shots: with a hat in front of my … tallywacker, with a dog in front of it, with my hand in front of it. The famed Francesco Scavullo photographed me on a bearskin rug. On the way to the photo shoot, I stopped for two quarts of vodka and finished one before we got to the studio, which was freezing cold (bad for a naked man's self-esteem). (I may or may not have had several cocktails in the greenroom before the show.) I said yes before we came back on the air. I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women's rights, but I just thought it would be fun. I found out later she'd asked Paul Newman first, but he turned her down. It would be a milestone in the sexual revolution, and she said I was the one man who could pull it off. She wanted the same prerogative for women. During a commercial break, she invited me to be the first male nude centerfold of the magazine.Īlthough no one had ever shown a naked man in a magazine before, Helen believed women have the same "visual appetites" as men, who'd been looking at naked women in Playboy since 1953. One night in early 1972, after Deliverance was in the can but before it was released, I was on The Tonight Show with Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and author of the best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl. Here, in an excerpt from the November 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan, more than 40 years after he posed atop the bearskin rug, Reynolds recalls the centerfold photoshoot in his own words. Still, despite his change of heart, Reynolds will be remembered as a man who played a significant role in Gurley Brown's own lifelong mission to put women's sexuality in the public eye. "They cared more about my pubes than they did the play." "Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls," he wrote.
In interviews throughout the last few years of his life, he expressed regret about the shoot and admitted that he looks back at himself during that time as "an egomaniac." In his memoir, My Life, Reynolds wrote that he found it strange how women reacted to him after the April 1972 issue hit stands. In 2016, Reynolds told Business Insider he felt the photo harmed his reputation as a "serious actor," and that Deliverance suffered because of the centerfold. The next year, when Doug Lambert created Playgirl, he credited the Reynolds centerfold as a source of inspiration.īut over the years, Reynolds grew to have a complicated relationship with the photoshoot that turned him into a sex symbol. Gurley Brown had pitched the idea to Reynolds as a "milestone in the sexual revolution." Prefacing the image was a declaration that a male centerfold was long overdue. He chose the photo that appeared in the magazine himself. His arm is strategically placed in front of his "tallywacker," as Reynolds later called it. He's got a smirk on his face, a limp cigarillo dangles from his lips, and a fuzzy bearskin rug is underneath his also-fuzzy body.
#TOM SELLECK PLAYGIRL MAGAZINE CENTERFOLD FULL#
Reynolds stretches across two full pages of the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan. "Well, nobody talked about it, but women liked to look at men naked. "At the time, you know, men liked to look at women naked," Gurley Brown later said. Shortly before Deliverance, his biggest film up to that point, was released, then-editor Helen Gurley Brown approached Reynolds to be the magazine's first-ever male centerfold. But in addition to his work on camera, Reynolds was also known as a heartthrob, and a now-iconic photoshoot that appeared in a 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan will forever be part of his legacy.