A Callipygian Pigeon on the West Coast has made us look with new admiration upon Playboy-cartoonist Jack Cole. Her name is Vikki Dougan, and she is the living realization of a style trend Jack prophesied in our January 1956 issue. Foretold Cole: "Having milked the utmost from décolletage, fashion will take an experimental plunge into 'derrierage.' " Style-setting Vikki, otherwise known as The Back (a transparent synecdoche for The Backside), has taken that plunge.
At the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's 1957 awards banquet, Vikki turned up in a gown that was not only backless but virtually seatless too -- cut down to reveal several startling inches of reverse cleavage. Masculine eyeballs popped, as did the flashbulbs of United Press, who caught Vikki with her rearguard down and sent over the wires a fascinating photo that had to be judiciously cropped for newspaper publication. "This gal," reported Tinseltown chronicler Mike Connelly, "makes great exits!" Present at the affair (which was held at Hollywood's Cocoanut Grove) were Sir Laurence Olivier, Mike Todd, Kirk Douglas, Nicky Hilton, Sam Goldwyn and other stalwarts, not to mention Jayne Mansfield, Elizabeth Taylor and Mamie Van Doren, three ladies who went mint green at Vikki's newsmaking. Some talk of "bad taste" was bandied about by women with more conventional cleavage exposed, but Vikki said something to the effect that people in glass dresses shouldn't throw stones and pointed out that she was only following standard operating procedure for starlets by displaying her assets. "I'm not busty," she confessed, demurely, "so what's a girl to do?"
You may have glimmed Vikki in The Great Man (she played the network receptionist who "made a great exit" from Keenan Wynn's apartment) and, before that, on TV (as one of Jackie Gleason's And-Away-We-Go girls). We understand José Ferrer auditioned over 200 girls for the Man bit before coming to the decision that Vikki had the precise talents required; we understand further that John Wayne, after catching her unbridled undulation in the Ferrer flick, lost no time in signing her to an exclusive contract.
You might say things are looking up for the dorsal Miss Dougan chiefly because the men are looking down.
At the Foreign Press Banquet in Hollywood, La Dougan's backless dress and dressless back caused tongue-clucking and shutter-clicking by the United Press.
The wirephoto that flashed across the nation.
There's much to be said for the front of The Back.
