burt renolds centerfold in playgirl magazine

The cover had teasing banner: At Last A Male Nude Centerfold - The Naked Truth About Guess Who!! Inside, it was prefaced by a daring declaration: The photograph that was eventually published was chosen by Reynolds himself. The great fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, who became famous for celebrity portraits in Cosmopolitan’s pages for the next 30 years, took hundreds of photos, creatively obscuring Reynolds’ junk with tactful positioning. On the way to the photo shoot, Reynolds stopped for a bottle of vodka. “ I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women’s rights, but I just thought it would be fun.” Reynolds later learned she had asked Paul Newman first, but he declined. She flattered him, telling him he was “ the one man who could pull it off“. Reynolds had enjoyed a few cocktails in the green room when Brown pitched the centerfold as a milestone in the sexual revolution. We like to look at their bodies, though it’s not as well known.”Īfter making her pitch to Hearst Magazine executives, many of whom said she’d gone too far, Brown approached Reynolds in 1971, during a commercial break while he was standing in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and asked if he’d be interested in posing nude for Cosmo. Brown had been in charge of the magazine for three years, expanding the circulation by rebranding it as a women’s magazine for single young women.

The idea came to Helen Gurley Brown, then editor of Cosmopolitan, one day in the late 1960s while she was washing the dishes. But although it launched Reynolds into a higher stratosphere of celebrity, his relationship with the picture was complicated. It captivated readers, challenged ideas about sexuality and spawned a wave of new publications. Its publication sparked a sort of revolution in women’s magazines.

The photo, Cosmopolitan magazine’s first male centerfold, was a radical statement: women had desires that deserved not just to be acknowledged, but to be catered to. Between his teeth, a limp lit cigarillo droops from his lips, not unlike a, well, you know. Veins bulge on his arms, one of which is conveniently placed in front of his special place. Burt Reynolds (1936 – 2018), stretched out on a bearskin rug, tanned, and much like the beast beneath him, he is very, very hairy.

Burt renolds centerfold in playgirl magazine