My sexuality was shaped by Playboy: Nick Curtis on the end of an era

Sexist? Maybe. Demeaning? Perhaps. Yet Nick Curtis has never been able to resist the charms of Playboy’s centrefolds. As the magazine puts an end to its most famous feature, he pays tribute to an icon of sexuality
By Nick Curtis9 February 2016

So, farewell then Candy, Brande, Victoria, Jennifer, Heather, Nicole and Pamela. You were Playboy magazine’s Playmates of the Month and pretty soon — when the Jan-uary/February 2016 double issue leaves the stands — you will be an extinct breed. When I heard that Hugh Hefner’s venerable but increasingly decrepit organ would no longer print nude centrefolds after 62 years, I cheered this sort of feminist victory, noted the triumph of free online porn over paid-for printed softcore and squeezed out a small tear. Because, like it or not, my sexuality was shaped by Playboy. The Playmate was the early benchmark of my romantic ambitions, the template of my erotic iconography and a constant presence in my life, forever winking at me from the news-agent’s top shelf, inviting me to riffle her pages. She was a busty, leggy, underclothed, upturned extravaganza of tan lines and shadowed declivities, a smorgasbord of sensual promise and unbearably unattainable sophistication.

The Playmate was born in 1954, 12 years before I was. I can’t remember the first of this luscious breed that I saw. As a timid youngster in the 1970s I wouldn’t have dreamed of sneaking a peek in a corner shop, and the sort of stuff occasionally passed round my South London comprehensive was Made-in-Britain grot. What’s more, growing up in a progressive, left-wing family and with mostly female, fiercely politicised classmates by the time I hit the sixth form, I believed then as I do now that gender equality is right and porn tends to demean. Maybe Playboy, with its imported veneer of sophistication, seemed alien enough to be the exception, at least to my teenage hormones.

At 16 I fell utterly in love with Marianne Gravatte, Playmate of the Month for October 1982 and Playmate of the Year for 1983. She was an aristocratic-looking blonde (actually a Hollywood grocery-store clerk) with feathered Farrah Fawcett hair and breasts that were improbably but magnificently buoyant on her slender dancer’s frame (34-21-32). On the data sheet that reduced each Playmate to soundbites, she listed the Colorado river as a turn-on and ‘smog, liver and flying’ as turn-offs.

Who cared? Here was a girl who looked classy bending over to pour tea on a beach wearing only rolled white stockings, who could rock legwarmers and heels (it was the 1980s) and whose orgiastically naked, backward-curled pose of invitation in her PMOY centrefold still elicits a Pavlovian surge in me. Without wishing to be too indelicate, this being the 1980s, Marianne also had a lush, thick bush. This was the look that defined my desire and I still prefer old-school Playboy imagery to today’s shaved and pumped erotica. Anyway, bush — lush or otherwise — was not up for discussion then, certainly not by a man who a) liked to see himself as enlightened and b) hoped to persuade a right-on girl to go out with him.

Iconic Playboy Magazine Covers

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No, of course I didn’t read the articles. But I persuaded myself that Playboy’s roster of classy contributors (Fleming, Mailer, Dahl, Heller), its part in the sexual revolution, its heavyweight interviews and its tendency to pontificate about jazz, whisky and lapels made it more than ‘just’ a porn mag.

By the turn of the millennium, Playboy had become sort of cool and collectible. I began unironically buying milestone copies when I found them — anniversary issues, James Bond specials, the first perfect-bound issue featuring a Playmate unperforated by a staple — justifying them as an ‘investment’.

In 2001, in a sign of Playboy’s respectability — long before it diversified into TV entertainment and fashion — the Evening Standard asked me to interview Hugh Hefner’s harem of seven Playmate girlfriends, who were in London for his 75th birthday party at Chinawhite as part of a promotional tour of Europe. I dubbed Tiffany, Stephanie, Kimberley, Tina, Regina, Michelle and Dalene the ‘Shagnificent Seven’, but in reality they were tiny, average-looking, bored, jet-lagged girls with painfully overblown boob jobs, all uttering the same platitudes about ‘following my dream’ and responding coyly to questions I really didn’t want to ask about the bedroom arrangements in the Playboy Mansion.

And now here we are, 15 years later. Hef is married to a third wife, 60 years his junior. I’m married, also to a leggy blonde (there’s conditioning for you). Playboy is a diversified media brand and the decision to take the magazine non-nude may even improve falling sales.

I long ago acknowledged that it is impossible to square my adult-lifelong affection for these fantasy women with my political beliefs, but hey, we’re all flawed, aren’t we? Except those centrefold girls, who were flawless, unattainable and, yes, unreal. That was the point of them. Girls, I’ll miss you. And Marianne, if you see this, call me.

Follow Nick on Twitter @nickcurtis

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