Vintage only 1995 and older — My favorite Penthouse Pets

[nevermind]

Originally Posted by Al Gebra

Some are, others are just smaller versions (as in your preceding post). Are your original pics that tiny, or is it P&H?

Not Ph.com but low res. mag. scans.

[Viklas]

Originally Posted by PenthouseFan

There's a CNBC special on PLAYBOY which features a few minutes on the competition with PENTHOUSE. They show Guccione and some of his staff during a pictorial with a Pet who is a brunette, fairly small/petite, and very long eye lashes.

Has anybody seen this special and can ID the girl? I'm gonna say the film footage was from 1973 thru 1977, most likely.

Is that the "Titans" program? I think that's on again tonight, if someone wants to screencap it...

[PenthouseFan]

Originally Posted by Viklas

Is that the "Titans" program? I think that's on again tonight, if someone wants to screencap it...

Yes, there's not much footage of the PENTHOUSE girl to screencap but it would help to ID her. It's probably in the middle 20-minutes of the program, BTW.

[fritzhoth]

"FORGET THE SEX AND JUST FEEL THE CLASS"
by Lynn 8ar6er, 5un6ay T1mez, 24/10/10

Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, who died last week, was a good boss to women, says ex-staffer Lynn Barber. It wasn't the girls that excited him, it was the thickness of the paper.

I first met Bob Guccione in 1965, when I was still an Oxford undergraduate. He'd caused a frenzy among the high tables by sending a mailshot launching Penthouse to all the professors and heads of colleges. Cherwell, the student newspaper, dispatched me to London to interview this American-Sicilian cartoonist and dry-cleaning manager who had so upset our masters.

I found him good fun and loved his dark, gravelly New Jersey accent; his sardonic humour and also his frankness. He freely admitted he was sending out his mailshot on a wing and a prayer and that he couldn't afford to print the magazine until the subscriptions started rolling in. He finished by saying: "If you ever need a job, honey, come to me." Ooh, I squeaked, would I have to take my clothes off? No, he laughed (somewhat to my chagrin), but we can always use bright girls.

So, a year and a half later, having failed to get into journalism by conventional means, I wrote to Guccione and asked for a job. Penthouse had by then been running for about a year, had a staff of six and was based in a tiny terraced house in Ifield Road, Fulham, a deeply grotty area at the time.

The magazine was supposed to be monthly but came out whenever Bob could afford to pay the printers. Lacking advertisers, it supported itself by means of the Penthouse Book Club (smutty books) and Penteez Panties (crotchless knickers and tassel bras), which meant we had to squeeze past cardboard boxes of the stuff to get to our desks. Bob took most of the photos and did the layouts, an ex-Tatler editor called Harry Fieldhouse produced most of the copy and I was editorial assistant and generaql dogsbody.

Bob's mantra was that the magazine had to be "classy". He was a great admirer of Playboy and shared Hugh Hefner's insistence that we had to run "intellectual" articles to "justify" (his word) the nudes. Thus he was perfectly happy when we bought 6,000-word essays on, say, Etruscan erotica or 18th-century satire - readability was never a requirement.

He was always friendly to me but he was shy and had no small talk outside Penthouse. He lived and breathed the magazine 24 hours a day - and it was more or less 24 hours a day because he suffered terrible insomnia. If he ever did fall asleep, nobody was allowed to wake him, so the tiny reception area at Ifield Road was always cluttered with businessmen who were meant to be his 10am, llam and midday appointments. The fact that they were prepared to wait so long suggested that he owed them money.

I never even attempted to understand Penthouse's finances but they were certainly precarious in those first few years. I was one of the lucky ones who was paid in cash - £16 a week - but I had to listen to endless complaints from others whose cheques had been lost in the post.

Years later, when I asked Bob if he was, as so often rumoured to be, backed by the mafia, he said (quite plausibly, I thought) that he would not have had such terrible money problems if he had had mafia backing. Anyway, he was thoroughly investigated by the FBI when he tried to launch an Atlantic City casino, and cleared of any link with organised crime.

Outsiders always assumed that Guccione slept with all the Pets, as the nude models were known, but I doubt it - he had eyes only for Kathy Keeton. She was a former strip queen from South Africa whom he met when she was starring at the Pigalle. He tried to get her to pose for Penthouse - she said no, but she would work as his advertising manager. They were an incredible partnership and remained deeply in love until her death from cancer 32 years later, and even then he kept her name on the masthead.

They always arrived at the Penthouse office together in his Cadillac, and often in matching outfits - I remember one particular vision of powder blue suede jodhpurs and bronze silk shirts undone to the waist. They didn't marry till 1988 (cradle Catholic that he was, he didn't divorce his wife Muriel until their three children were grown up) but Kathy was the love of his life.

He told Rolling Stone magazine he sometimes had to sleep with Pets in the early days to persuade them to pose but he told me that he was relieved when the magazine was so successful he didn't have to sleep with them. There were rumours of threesomes when they moved to New York, but I imagine those were instigated by Kathy, if they happened at all. He certainly did not, like Hefner, run a harem. Nor did he ever throw parties like Hefner's because, basically, he didn't know anyone outside Penthouse.

He was a good employer of women and completely non-discriminatory. He gave big breaks not only to me, but to Anna Wintour, now editor of now editor of American Vogue, Anna Raeburn, the broadcaster, and Dawn Steel, who went on to ran Paramount studios.

One of the great virtues of Penthouse in the early days was that, because it was so understaffed, there was no departmentalisation or pecking order - everyone pitched in, doing whatever jobs needed doing. I was not only letters and reviews editor but also stylist on some Pet shoots, which meant powdering the girl's bottom, arranging the odd feather boa and changing records on the hi-fi.

Although Bob had no training or even experience as a photographer, he quickly developed his own distinctive style. Guccione's girls tended to be introspective, locked in their own reveries, not flashing big smiles like Playboy girls. There were always flowers in the background or sometimes the foreground - his rival Paul Raymond once remarked: "That guy is a failed florist."

Early issues of Penthouse were hideously pink/orange in tone, but the standard of colour printing gradually improved. Guccione was obsessed not only with colour reproduction, but with paper quality and weight. He could easily have cut costs at Penthouse by using thinner paper but he never did. He also had an odd taste for thick brown paper inserts. He used them for the reviews section which I edited and I always objected that nobody could read the words against the brown background, but he said that didn't matter - the pages looked "classy".

As his confidence grew, he imitated Playboy less slavishly. Our girls were less saccharine than Playboy's, there was less obsession with big boobs, more interest in bottoms, and our girls started showing pubic hair in April 1970, nine months before Playboy. Penthouse was possibly more sympathetic to the counterculture than Playboy, though Guccione, like Hefner, was deeply old-fashioned at heart.

It was an odd period, the late Sixties, early Seventies. Bob felt he was leading the sexual revolution because he was showing nudity, but meanwhile girls were flinging their clothes off at pop festivals without a second thought. I remember a girl once started undressing in Penthouse reception and Mo, the receptionist, told her sternly: "Mr Guccione will not have that."

Penthouse was gaining circulation all the seven years I worked there, and in 1969 Bob decided to launch it in America. It meant that he and Kathy moved to New York, and the London office became terribly dull without them. I had to go to New York once a month to show Bob the UK page proofs and bring back transparencies. I was impressed by the care he put into checking the proofs, but hurt that he never asked about the London staff and just looked blank if I said that so-and-so was getting married. He had moved on.

I suppose, being American, his heart was always set on the US, and after a few years he sold the English edition of Penthouse, which headed rapidly downhill.

I left Penthouse in 1974 to start a family and heard only occasional news of Guccione. But in 1983 the Sunday Express sent me to interview my old boss in New York. He was then at the absolute height of his success. Forbes magazine put his personal wealth at $400m, Penthouse had overtaken Playboy and was regularly selling 3.5m, and would sell 5.4m copies (the biggest newsstand sale of any magazine) of its July 1984 issue featuring a nude Miss America.

Bob and Kathy had moved into "the Mansion" at 12 East 67th Street. It was the largest private residence in Manhattan and decorated in Bob and Kathy's ineffable style, which was sort of Versace before Versace. The front door opened on to a load of CCTV cameras and security men, but then you were through into the loggia with pillars and a Roman mosaic swimming pool on one side and a strange dark seating area at the end lined with gloomy Old Masters - a Pieta, a Deposition from the Cross, a martyred saint supposed to be by El Greco - and a wall of linenfold panelling that whooshed away at the touch of a button to reveal a cinema screen.

I was expecting Bob to be hours late, as he always used to be, but he was on time and welcomed me up to the big living room upstairs. He told me that he had stopped smoking, started sleeping, and had actually been on holiday (to South Africa with Kathy) for the first time in his life. He was keen to show me his art collection and it was stunning - a Van Gogh, a Matisse, a Renoir, a Modigliani, a couple of Degas pastels, a lovely Picasso Pink Period drawing of his son - at least two dozen topnotch paintings on the walls and another two dozen standing round waiting to be hung. I assumed that Bob must have some very competent forger working for him but, when I floated this idea, he was hurt and said no, no they were all genuine and started pulling auction catalogues out of the bookshelves, marked with ticks and crosses and instructions on prices. He had always been keen on art — as a boy, he had owned a book on French impressionists and whenever one of the paintings illustrated in that book came up for sale, he tried to buy it.

Kathy joined us later and showed me round the rest of the house - all swan-neck gold taps and marble bathrooms, fur rugs and swagged silk curtains - while her five terrifying rhodesian ridgebacks took turns at humping my leg.

Bob seemed really pleased to see me and urged me to stay at the Mansion whenever I was in New York. By now secure in his success, he was happy to reminisce about the early days in Ifield Road. But he also talked about his current and future projects, which I should have seen was where the rot was setting in.

He was pouring several million dollars a year into building an Atlantic City casino that was meant to fund his even more grandiose dream, a nuclear fusion plant. This plant, he said, would be able to supply all the domestic power needed in the US and he had 82 scientists in San Diego working on it as we spoke.

I suspect it was Kathy's dream more than his - she believed herself to be a great futurist thinker - but anyway he was committed to it. So much so that it turned out later he had spent $20m on the nuclear fusion research and $65m on the Atlantic City casino, neither of which came to fruition.

I wrote a merry piece about my visit to Bob and Kathy but got word back, via the art director, that Bob would kill me if I ever set foot in New York again. He didn't mind me making fun of him but I had made fun of Kathy, which he could never forgive.

There was an odd postscript a few years later. Harry Fieldhouse, the editor I first worked for at Penthouse, with whom I'd remained friends, developed Parkinson's and I was so shocked by the dire straits I found him in that I wrote to Bob and asked if he would fund a daily carer. Bob didn't reply but Kathy did, much to my surprise (I didn't even know she could write) and it was an extraordinarily I thoughtful letter.
She said she knew that Harry would never accept charity but she would get Bob to offer him the post of "Penthouse historian" with a brief to write whatever he could for $10,000 a year. Harry showed me the letter on my next visit and said he'd accepted the post although, he complained, Guccione was underpaying him.

I'm glad I didn't witness Bob's terrible decline and fall. After Kathy's death in 1997 he became even more reclusive and seldom left the Mansion. A year later he was diagnosed with cancer, and had bits of his tongue, palate and epiglottis removed.

Penthouse circulation was by then in freefall and Guccione betrayed all his principles by making it ever sleazier to compete with the internet - he actually ran a feature on "watersports", which was a million miles from the "celebrating female pulchritude" of my day. Drowning in debt, he debased the magazine he'd once been so proud of and still went bankrupt anyway.

His art collection, which had been valued at $59m in 2000 went in a fire sale for $19m in 2002. He also, tragically, fell out with his sons.

It was a sad, sad end. But I am lucky to have known him in his rise rather than his fall, and remain grateful to him as my first employer.

[PenthouseFan]

Guccione was a great artist and photographer, but a TERRIBLE businessman (not that Heffner was any better). Aside from not maximizing the PENTHOUSE brand via cable and VHS tapes in the 1980's -- let alone DVDs in the 1990's -- he threw away big bucks on the other magazines that didn't have enough advertising support (like OMNI).

Plus, the NJ casino was a complete fiasco -- how he managed to lose $75-$100 MM, I will never know. It's one thing to lose a few million dollars on land and architectural and legal fees, but remember this was the early-1980's. You're talking the equivalent of $200 MM or more in today's dollars. You don't commit big $$$ to a project like that unless you are sure you can get the license and property built. Had PENTHOUSE gotten the license, it might have been a big moneymaker in Atlantic City but it was just a huge rat hole. I'm still not sure how they managed to spend that much money unless they ordered everything to build a casino and hotel and just assumed the NJ Gaming Authority would hand over a license. Even then, I would think they could have sold the bricks and stuff to minimize the loss.

Outside of Kathy Keeton (his future wife), alot of the people employed at PENTHOUSE seemed to also be slip-shod in business sense. They financed dubious scientific projects on everything from bogus cancer treatments to cold fusion. Even the gifts awarded to the Pets Of The Year sometimes came with strings attached or were just 'promised' to the magazine/POTY's and never delivered. Ginger Miller (1989) and I believe a few other girls either never got what was promised to them and/or sued to get the gift or a monetary settlement. I don't think the magazine was out to shaft them, I just think it was an example of the incompetence of the people who worked on the business/marketing side of the magazine. The actual content and quality of the magazine for most of the 1970s through 1990's was top-notch.

The financial problems hit in the early-1990's and when KK died in 1997, it was all downhill. You could see it in everything from the pictorials to the writing content.

End of an era, and the quality magazine he ran will be missed.

[USBPepsi]

Originally Posted by PenthouseFan

Plus, the NJ casino was a complete fiasco -- how he managed to lose $75-$100 MM, I will never know. It's one thing to lose a few million dollars on land and architectural and legal fees, but remember this was the early-1980's. You're talking the equivalent of $200 MM or more in today's dollars. You don't commit big $$$ to a project like that unless you are sure you can get the license and property built. Had PENTHOUSE gotten the license, it might have been a big moneymaker in Atlantic City but it was just a huge rat hole. I'm still not sure how they managed to spend that much money unless they ordered everything to build a casino and hotel and just assumed the NJ Gaming Authority would hand over a license. Even then, I would think they could have sold the bricks and stuff to minimize the loss.

I've heard some behind-the-scenes reminiscing from Atlantic City contacts, and apparently Guccione paid out huge money in bribes to people who he eventually realized were stringing him along the whole time. No matter how much money he shelled out, there was no way he was going to get a gaming license. There was no chance of him applying pressure, because they had "friends" who could push back, hard. Unfortunately his ego had caused him to get way too far into the property development before he saw how impossible the situation was. He basically went about the whole deal ass-backwards. Maybe buy the land, but DON'T get in so deep before you have the license in your hands. His hubris was his downfall.

By the way, I was a huge fan of Omni, young kid (and science geek) that I was. In the long run, though, it just appealed to too narrow an audience.

[PenthouseFan]

Originally Posted by polartrade

I've heard some behind-the-scenes reminiscing from Atlantic City contacts, and apparently Guccione paid out huge money in bribes to people who he eventually realized were stringing him along the whole time. No matter how much money he shelled out, there was no way he was going to get a gaming license. There was no chance of him applying pressure, because they had "friends" who could push back, hard. Unfortunately his ego had caused him to get way too far into the property development before he saw how impossible the situation was. He basically went about the whole deal ass-backwards. Maybe buy the land, but DON'T get in so deep before you have the license in your hands. His hubris was his downfall.

Agreed...I believe the NJ Gaming authorities had concerns about Guccione's ties to organized crime. If he had given shady figures $$$ to get the casino, that just shows you what bad advice he had gotten. It's not like Guccione was hanging out with John Gotti or the other NY families, he probably paid off some low-level goons near Atlantic City (probably the Philly mob, if anything). Still...for a huge project like this, you don't commit any big $$$ unless authorized by the NJ Gaming authority and/or NJ elected officials or the governor. You pay off low-level creeps to get an extension done on your business or home, not put up a multi-hundred million dollar casino. Maybe he should have looked into buying an established or run-down hotel/casino instead of building from scratch.

If Guccione had plowed alot of Penthouse's earnings into regular financial assets -- stocks and bonds -- in the 1980's he would have had the financial cushion to ride out the 1990's and the casino/backtax problems. Remember, he was on the Forbes 400 list in 1982 but was spending millions on the upkeep of the Manhattan mansion and the upstate NY estate. Ginger Miller told me that he had a complete staff 24/7 at the upstate estate. They probably spend a few million on that place alone; the Manhattan townhouse cost $5 MM annually in upkeep/taxes/etc. Thats alot of $$$ annually into real estate !

By the way, I was a huge fan of Omni, young kid (and science geek) that I was. In the long run, though, it just appealed to too narrow an audience.

I agree with you about OMNI -- had some interesting stories and I usually peaked at the covers. Alot fewer science mags at that time so it had better shelf space in the 1980's. But Guccione let alot of the mags stay open longer than they should have, probably because KK viewed them as her little projects.

BTW, thanks to the moderators for letting some non-picture posts on this thread...I think it's relevant to discuss Guccione's passing here, rather than give it a separate thread.

[electile disfunction]

I don't think a picture has been posted to this thread in almost 2 weeks, folks.

[USBPepsi]

Originally Posted by electile disfunction

I don't think a picture has been posted to this thread in almost 2 weeks, folks.

In mourning. Still...



It was nice to see Julie Strain brought back, and still looking... macho. She gives me such weird mixed feelings.

[Al Gebra]

Doone Buddy: Laura Doone (POM October 1974), photos by Bob Guccione, pages 65-77 (credit to original scanner)

(Almost) full page scans




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