George Plimpton: Playboy Photographer

When I was offered the project of trying to photograph a Playmate for this magazine some time back, I thought I might stick to it for a number of years, just easing around with my camera and recruiting new candidates, browsing here and there, perhaps in Scandinavia--a long and pleasant contemplation that would be extended either by never quite finding the right girl ("She had a blemish on her knee") or by suffering equipment difficulties ("I'm having lens-cap problems"). (text continued on page 192) I had a vague notion of the sort of picture I wanted to end up with--a girl standing in a meadow, perhaps with a horse. But there was no need to rush it. I saw the opportunity as a steady adjunct to my life--like going to the theater.

But after a while, the people in Playboy's Chicago office began to apply pressure. They wanted to know "what was going on."

The truth was that nothing was going on. I had done very little since Mark Kauffman, the Photography Editor of the magazine, had asked me if, in my guise as an amateur trying other people's professions, I would like to photograph and offer a candidate for a month's Playmate. His idea was that I would take shots of seven or (continued on page 219)George Plimpton(continued from page 192) eight girls of my choosing. Eventually, these would be introduced at the regular Playmate-candidate meeting, at which Hugh Hefner, the Editor-Publisher, presides; the challenge would be to see if any of my submissions was good enough to be chosen as Playmate.

I had accepted with blazing alacrity. I had some business cards, embossed with the Playboy Rabbit symbol to give them an official cast, printed on which I was identified as an Associate Photographer. I planned to produce these whenever I spotted a pretty girl. I took out my camera and took some warm-up shots around the apartment--the cat and a standing lamp. I bought some film.

But then a hitch--a sense of ill ease and awkwardness that kept me from approaching a girl, just not having the pizzazz to confront a prospective subject with what I wanted to do. I was even unable to unload my business cards. It was the fear of being turned down . . . a long-legged girl striding across a New York avenue, the turn of her head at my voice, the bell of her hair swinging ("Ahem . . . I wonder if . . ."), and the quick contempt as she looked at my business card and let it flutter to the pavement.

Indeed, during a number of months I had tried the business card only once--suddenly handing one on impulse to a pretty hotel receptionist in Tampa. I lowered my voice to keep the room clerk, standing by the keyrack, from overhearing. The girl's eyes widened at my explanation. To my astonishment, she said, "Oh, well, OK. I'll do it. For a lark." I rushed out and rented a camera.

When she arrived in my hotel room, she stepped out of her clothes as nonchalantly as if she were in a bathhouse getting ready for a swim. She fluffed her public hair with a quick brushing motion of her hand and turned in front of me. She had two tattoos, one large butterfly on her rump and what looked like a red rose on her hipbone. "Had these done as a lark," she explained. "In Dallas. The guy I was going with was a tattoo freak."

"They're very nice," I said.

"You're not angry about them?" she asked. "Sometimes they startle people."

"No, no." I said. "But I don't know about the people at Playboy. I think what they're looking for is a sort of fresh Doris Day quality, the girl next door who plays a lot of ping-pong with her kid brother. Those tattoos. . . ." I shrugged. "Is there any way you can arrange your-self so that the tattoos don't show?" I asked.

She tried. She flung herself onto the hotel bed in a series of poses that through my viewfinder seemed to suggest that she was in the strains of a convulsion, one hand clutched at her hip, the other spread on her backside. We tried some props--the Bible from the hotel dresser opened so that it would hide the rose.

"There's a lot of action in these shots," I told her to keep her spirits up as I photographed. "Something certainly is going on. Full of mood. Fantastic!"

I cannot remember that over the ensuing months I ever gave away another of my business cards. When Kauffman telephoned from Chicago about a year after the project had been begun, he asked about the cards, having some idea that I must surely have flooded the country with them--like propaganda leaflets.

"Well, I've used only one," I told him.

"One!" He sounded aghast. How on earth was the project coming along? What had happened?

"Well, I do a lot of thinking about it," I said.

"Yes, but how many girls have you photographed so far?"

"Three," I told him.

"Just three?"

I explained about the Tampa girl with the tattoos.

"Why did you want to photograph her?" Kauffman asked.

"I didn't know about the tattoos," I said. "They suddenly arrived--like unexpected guests at the door."

I continued about the two others. One was the famous fashion model Naty Abascal. She was hardly a Playmate type, I admitted, with a grand haughty face and a tall thin-hipped body like the back end of a giraffe. [As a judge of Miss Abascal's Playboy potential, Plimpton made a good quarterback. What his fetching subject had neglected to tell him was that she had already been featured in this magazine, with Woody Allen, in a July 1971 pictorial, "I'll Put Your Name in Lights, Natividad Abascal."--Ed.] But I had been sitting next to her at a dinner party in the Dominican Republic and when I explained it to her, she thought the whole idea was "superfantastic." The party was outside, by the water, with the trade winds flickering the candles in their holders, and I thought she wanted to start in right away--just shucking her dinner gown at the table and standing up among the guests.

The next morning she strode across a white beach, her body dark as oil in the sun, and she preened herself among the palm fronds that drop to the water's edge. Every time I raised the camera, she automatically lapsed into a pose. At the end of the afternoon, she saw herself as an Amazonian Leander emerging from the sea. She waded farther and farther out, and then turned and strode toward me, the sun behind her and the sea smacking at her back so the droplets flew up over her head and sparkled. I waded out. The swells sucked at my hips and I felt the Dominican paper money in my wallet absorb the sea. I held the camera high overhead. She was so experienced that every gesture was calculated and correct and every arched pose of her body was identifiable, so that when I brought the camera down to take a picture, the viewfinder seemed to reflect the riffled pages of a Harper's Bazaar.

I told Kauffman that with my third girl that had not been the case at all. She was a New Yorker named Barbara who had done scarcely any professional modeling. We wandered around her apartment, her bare feet padding on the tiles, and we rarely looked at each other--like two people at a cocktail party who no longer have anything to say to each other. I could not think how to pose her. She sat in a chair as if she were being interviewed for a job.

"How's this?" She settled herself behind a potted palm and peeked out.

"Fantastic!" I said. She must have caught something in my voice.

"How does it really look?" she asked.

"It's not quite right," I said truthfully. "It looks as if . . . well, you were going to spring out at something . . . a sort of Cheshire-cat attitude."

We continued through the apartment. She stood behind a shower curtain and peered at me, giggling.

"Fantastic!"

We found ourselves in the kitchen. "Do you think this might work?" She lay down on the counter. I removed the toaster from behind her head.

"Perhaps! Perhaps!" I said as I looked through the viewfinder.

"Those kitchen shots might be OK," I told Kauffman over the telephone. "Sort of domestic and nice. I haven't had them developed yet."

Kauffman did not seem especially reassured. He suggested that I come to Chicago. We could discuss the project further. Certainly I needed to photograph some more girls. I could look over the unsolicited photographs that flooded his office from girls eager to pose--the "over-the-transom" stuff. At least that first obstacle of mine--being ill at ease in asking girls--would be bypassed: These girls were willing, though of course he could not vouch for the quality.

In Chicago I spent a day following his advice. I looked at a couple of months' worth of unsolicited photographs and read the accompanying letters. Most of the photographs were Polaroids taken in surroundings that were stark and glaringly lit--often a motel room, it appeared--with the girl standing in the background, usually posed awkwardly against the wall. Quite a number were from fat women who felt the magazine might want a photo of them for an "April-fool" issue. One was from a woman who wrote she was so fat that she could not fit into an average bathtub. The accompanying photograph of her in the buff showed her very large, indeed, looking wistfully into an old-fashioned bathtub with claw feet. Kauffman's secretary, Renay, came by as I was looking at the photograph and told me about a fat man who had sent in a picture of himself in a jockstrap. It had been taken in some hotel room, a chair in the background, and the message with it read, "Thought you might be interested." No sooner had Renay returned it than it turned up in the mail again--with the identical message.

Renay told me that there were many unsolicited photographs of this sort, from obviously unsuitable people, and almost invariably photographed in barren rooms with a standard lamp tipped to provide enough light.

I asked what sort of response Playboy sent to such people--and she showed me a form letter that said that the editors were sorry but that the consensus was that the girl (or fat lady, or jock-clad gentleman) did not have that "something extra special" that sets the Playmates apart.

I went in to see Kauffman. I told him that I was not having much luck with his over-the-transom stuff.

"Well, I wouldn't be discouraged," he said. "In the past five years, out of those hundreds of requests a week, we've asked only five girls to come in for test shots, of whom only one made it as a Playmate gatefold."

He went on to say that almost invariably. Playmates were selected from submissions by professional photographers (free-lancers and Playboy staffers). That would probably be the best course for me--to look at expertly done transparencies (no more motel rooms) and select a girl who seemed especially fetching and suitable.

While I was in the Chicago office, I did some research on past centerfolds to see if there was a clue to why certain Playmates had achieved exceptional popularity--hoping, naturally, to apply what I discovered to my own project. To judge from the number of letters received by the magazine, the most popular Playmate was a girl named DeDe Lind, who was Miss August back in 1967. Her appearance elicited over 1600 letters, a remarkable 600 more than received by her runner-up in this department, Cynthia Myers, the December Playmate in 1968. (The most letters ever received by Playboy, incidentally, were not on the subject of Playmates but over 8000 queries and comments regarding a picture story about a portable house.)

The Lind girl for her most popular pose is set in a playroom with a quantity of games equipment scattered around on a zebraskin rug: a tennis racket, a shuttle-cock, a teeterboard. A dartboard is hung from the wall and Miss Lind is holding a dart in one hand. She was photographed with a yellow bow in her hair, her face pert and fresh and unmistakably American.

As for Miss Myers, she was photographed crouched on a fluffy Angora carpet with a white Teddy bear (a sprig of holiday holly around its neck) and she is smiling merrily at the reader from a somewhat unnatural tilted position that makes her breasts, which are large, especially prominent.

To check the sort of pose it might be wise to avoid in my picture, I looked up the Playmate who had provoked the largest number of critical letters. She turned out to be a striking girl photographed standing on a rock by the sea, from which she has apparently just emerged (which did not bode well for my pictures of Naty Abascal on the Dominican beaches). The Playmate is wearing a bikini (perhaps that was the cause of the criticism) and she is carrying a snorkeling face mask.

I went in to see Kauffman with my findings. "My assumptions are not very steady." I admitted. "But for my project, it's possible that a yellow bow in my girl's hair might help. So would a distinctive rug under her--failing a zebra, certainly an Angora. A white Teddy bear ought to be on the premises and so should a shuttlecock. The girl must be tilted slightly. She probably should be carrying a dart. Certainly not a snorkeling mask."

"No."

"That apparently provokes bad fantasies . . . creatures emerging from the lagoon."

"Obviously."

"In fact, if she is going to emerge from anywhere, it should be from over the threshold of a portable house."

"I see."

Kauffman asked me what sort of picture I truly did visualize taking. I told him that I hoped to find a girl who would fit into an outdoor photograph. I explained that it had always been a mild fantasy of mine to come across a young girl in a field of, oh, rye, or standing in a woodland glen, just coming around a tree and seeing her, the sort of thing that always got the Greek gods into trouble when they strolled out for a constitutional--Zeus, say, with the river nymph lo. "It might be nice to have a horse with her." I added.

"A horse!?"

"Not saddled or anything. She's ridden it there bareback and she's just slid off it and is standing in the grass, looking at the person who's surprised her--smiling in a sort of shy, puzzling way."

"Well, that's all right, but I'm very skeptical about that horse," Kauffman said. He went on to say that one of the challenges of taking a centerfold picture was the requirement that the photographer use the big 8 x 10 Deardorff portrait camera. "With that camera, it's difficult enough to take a picture of a vase with some flowers in it," Kauffman said, "much less a horse!"

"What's wrong with using an ordinary thirty-five-millimeter camera?" I asked.

Kauffman explained that pictures taken with a 35mm camera do not blow up to the size of the Playboy gatefold without producing a grainy quality. The difference is small but apparent to a sharp eye. "We tried to sneak one by Hefner at an editorial meeting--because the eight-by-ten is such a bastard to use, and restrictive . . . and we tried to prove how little difference there is. But he caught us at it. That's why gatefold photography is limited to perhaps eight photographers. It's a very specialized art."

On his recommendation, I dropped in to see one of the eight--Dwight Hooker, an intense and voluble man who sat me down in his small Chicago office under the come-on gaze of such a stretch of his models, their pictures pinned to the wall, that the little room seemed to glow with the pink skin texture that seems so endemic to centerfold art.

"Most gatefold shootings are disappointments because of the eight-by-ten camera," Hooker said. "You cannot make mistakes. What that big camera sees is utterly explicit. You can't fake with it. You have to know your craft so well; you must call upon your motor skills to such a degree that the relationship with the girls often becomes painfully wooden and sexless. The fires go out."

"Oh, dear," I said.

"But don't worry," he said. "It's a fantastic experience. When the girl turns up at the studio, it's like meeting your bride at an arranged marriage. We get acquainted. I ask them what they do that pleases them. I'm fascinated by what they tell me, whatever it is. As quickly as possible, I get shooting. I watch the girl get turned on by the camera itself--a reaction I don't pretend to understand. But surely the girls are excited by its presence and by the seduction it performs. The vast majority want it. Indeed, they wouldn't mind being photographed by a camera without any film in it at all!"

He spoke with relish about his profession in a sort of headlong rush of enthusiasm.

"It's very similar to lovemaking--a good photographer shoots rhythmically rather than visually. The words the photographer uses reflexively are love words: 'Fantastic,' 'I love it,' 'It's working!' You won't find him saying, 'I notice that the sun is catching the color tones in your hair very nicely.' "

"No," I said.

"The earliest shooting sessions are the most sexual. . . ."

"But it's the camera they're interested in," I emphasized.

"The camera is a very dominant instrument," Hooker said. "It's used by photographers, who are, in general, a very insecure breed. It's the camera itself that has seduced the girl out of her clothing and is making love to her . . . which doesn't help the photographer's security. Often a girl will say, 'I don't feel like being photographed today--I don't feel sexy.' She's referring to her relationship with the camera, not the photographer. So try to take as many pictures as possible before the situation becomes strained. All those hours begin to diminish the emotional charm. If it could be done, shootings would be better as one-night stands."

"You're making me very insecure," I said.

"Nonsense. Think of it: Whatever the power of his camera, a photographer is involved in an act by which a girl becomes immortal, a fragile moment caught and given a place in the cultural continuum. . . ."

"The cultural continuum . . . ?"

"You'll have a grand time," he said, grinning at me.

Packing my camera with new and somewhat ambivalent respect, I journeyed out to the West Coast. There I was taken in hand by Marilyn Grabowski. Playboy's West Coast Photo Editor and a striking girl herself, who began to arrange some models for me to photograph so that I would have a selection ready for Hefner's editorial meeting. I took some pictures of a girl on the lawn of his Mansion West . . . a very arty attempt in which I hoped to catch her in the sparkle of sunlit droplets from the sprinkler system. The lens got wet. We capered across the grass. Someone looking down at the scene from a top window said that it looked as if the girl, smacked by the sprinkler stream as it clicked across the lawn, were riding a broomstick of water.

Hefner himself came out to watch. The girl was lithe and smooth as an otter in the sheen of water. Hefner said he assumed that I would also be submitting pictures of a somewhat heftier girl--the archetypal Playmate with the big breasts.

"I'm not comfortable with . . . ah . . . that size," I said.

"Think of it as a challenge," Hefner said. "It's the sort of challenge you ought to face--like getting on a football field against those big defensive linemen on the Detroit Lions."

"Yes," I said.

"Think of her as Alex Karras."

"I'll try."

"If tits are intimidating," Hefner went on wryly, "and there's not time enough to work that problem out before the photography, perhaps you can work it out during the test itself."

Marilyn found such a girl for me. Her name was Jane. I don't recall ever asking someone's measurements, but in her case, when she arrived, it seemed appropriate.

She said she was 39--23--34. "The real crazy thing is that my roommate has no bust and is all hips. We've talked about trading. Joking, of course. Because I'm happy the way I am. I've had my bust since I was twelve. I was very sensitive about it then. They called me Bubbles, of course, but now I am acclimated. We get along fine."

Jane spoke of her bust in an off, detached way, referring to it almost as if another presence accompanied us. She supported her breasts in the crook of her arm as we walked around, looking for a place for her to pose.

"Would you like us over here?" she asked. She settled herself carefully on a settee. Ah, well, there was nothing to do but start taking their picture.

Later, I did some photographing on my own. I went up to Bernard Cornfeld's mansion behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. There were invariably pretty girls there who had wandered waiflike into the financier's pop-Gothic protectorate. I was introduced to one named Colette. She would be delighted to pose. I offered her a cigarette from one of Cornfeld's cigarette boxes.

"No," she said. "I'm preparing for transcendental meditation. No smokes, no pills."

I had to lean forward to understand. "I don't talk--I murmur," she said. "Like Daisy in The Great Gatsby."

She suddenly decided to show me her diary.

"Shouldn't we start the photographing?" I asked.

She fled across the Great Hall and arrived back with three small volumes. She plumped herself down next to me and began to turn the pages. The diary was elaborately filled with drawings, many of moonscapes and sunrises bordered with flowers, every page or so stiff with pasted-in mementos--bird feathers, rose petals, beetle wings, theater-ticket stubs--including a page whose sandpapery texture turned out to be glued-on sand from a beach in Ceylon. Often at the top of a day's entry, she drew the day's weather--a yellow sun with a smiling mouth and eyelashed eyes.

"Here's the day the birds fell into the fireplace!" she cried. The page was decorated with a funereal frieze of National Wildlife Federation stamps.

Her eyes lit up. "Look! Here's a photo of one of my cars! The cars I drive in are often in crashes. This one was called Mercy--after Mercedes. It's actually another make--I forget which."

She turned the pages slowly, occasionally reading a line or so from her own poems ("Sea, I love the way you tremble"). A glimpse of her way of life began to emerge: romance ("I left him because of my sorrow, not because of another lover"). lassitude ("I wasted a whole morning looking for a pool to swim in"), mystery ("I think Paul sneaked this diary from underneath the mattress while I was in a deep, drug-induced sleep"), drama ("We had dinner with the prince and I ended up calling him his Royal Arrogance and someday I'll tell the story of how he threw his dinner plate at his mother across the table"), her peregrinations ("The ground in front of Warfield Hall is covered with a thin sheet of frost and I am trying to decide whether to go riding, or go down-stairs, or go to France").

I said, "Shouldn't we go upstairs and start the picture-taking?"

"I will, if you take a picture of me in a bubble bath," she said. "I'll put some soap flakes in my diary."

We went up to Cornfeld's bath. The light was dim. She hummed and talked to herself as the bubbles built up around her. I sat on a barber's chair Cornfeld has installed in his bathroom and tried to steady the camera through some time exposures.

"Which shall I pick? Oh, dear."

"I beg your pardon?" I said.

"Which bubbles shall I put in my diary?" Her head peeked through a mountain of suds.

I went and stood by the bath. "How about these over here?" I suggested.

She ran her fingers through them and, rising from the tub, the suds hanging from her like cotton, she ran for her diary in the bedroom.

"They're making a nice damp mark," she called back. "When I show my diary, I'll say, 'Oh, here's the day I was photographed for Playboy. Here are the bubbles!' " Her voice was giddy with excitement.

The photographs did not come out satisfactorily. Those of Colette in the bath were underexposed and oddly pink in the artificial light. Marilyn Grabowski asked, "Where did you take these--in a cellar? Is that a wine vat?" she wondered of Cornfeld's bathtub.

She was selecting my best pictures for the Playmate-candidate meeting. She picked six or seven of each of my girls. From time to time, she shook her head. She remarked on the receptionist from Tampa. "Those are the strangest poses. They're not obscene or anything; they're just odd."

"Well, we had some problems." I said.

Kauffman came out from Chicago for the candidate meeting. So did Arthur Kretchmer, the Editorial Director. It was held amidst the baronial artifacts of the Mansion West's Dining Room. The motif of kingly animals is extensive--lions stitched into the tapestries on the wall; each armrest of the blue brocaded dining room chairs is faced with a lion's head: and in the fireplace, a pair of brass andirons fashioned as mastiffs stand with surprisingly regal dignity, considering each has a gold snake in its jaws . . . all of this burnished by a gentle after-noon light from the small-paned casement windows.

Hefner was there, of course. Marilyn and another photo editor. Holly Wayne, both in fetching cheesecloth tunics, arrived with large brown envelopes and set them on a Queen Anne sideboard next to a portable photo viewer plugged in and aglow with opaque light. Each envelope was marked with the name of the potential Playmate and her photographer. Inside were plastic transparency holders with the best transparencies the photographer could select. The packages with my candidates were among them . . . the identity of the photographer disguised with jocular coyness by the name Henri Derrière. Derrière! I had protested, but it was too late.

Hefner went to work quickly, peering at each transparency with a brass magnifying eyepiece engraved with his initials and M. West, for Mansion West. He used it with surprising speed, as if just a glimpse of each candidate sufficed, plopping the eyepiece down onto a transparency like a stethoscope, then moving quickly to the next. The staff hovered behind him. Occasionally, stooped over his eyepiece, he would offer up a somewhat clinical evaluation: "Well, we have a little problem with the fanny here, don't we? It's a cute little problem, though," or "The lips are nice and full, but isn't there a cheekbone problem?" Sometimes his judgment was aesthetic: "I don't think this is the type of girl who lies against satin sheets." Almost all the first packages he looked at he accepted--either for further test shots or for actual gatefold photography.

"Derrière??"

He had come to my manila envelopes. Muffled laughter went up around the room. "A photographer with whose work I am not acquainted," said Hefner formally.

He bent to the viewing screen. "Look at this. Derrière has this girl, a very pretty one, lying on a kitchen counter. I haven't seen that . . . well, ever."

He looked at me. "Look at those appliance plugs."

"We thought it was kind of imaginative," I said lamely.

He turned to another of my candidates. "There's something very wrong with this navel. Has the girl got an ache? Is that a Bible?" It was my Tampa girl.

Colette's pictures did not please him, either. He said that Henri Derrière had simply not done her justice. "They're possible, but I'm not very enthusiastic," he said. "The body is nice, very nice, but Derrière hasn't got much out of the face except blah."

He put down his eyepiece and grinned at me. "Well, Derrière, I don't suppose you would mind extending this search?"

"Why, no. Of course not," I said.

"I mean, it's not an onerous job, especially."

"Not at all."

"You're not dismayed?"

"I'm rather pleased," I said truthfully.

"You haven't quite surmounted the problems with what I've seen here."

"Trial runs," I said. "Besides, Derrière is at his best with the big eight-by-ten camera."

That evening, Hefner gave me some advice. Dressed in blue pajamas, he hauled his legs up under him like a gawky boy as he got himself settled comfortably on the leather sofa in the Living Room of his Mansion.

He told me that almost from the beginning, a successful if subtle ingredient of a centerfold had been the unseen presence of a man--a lover, presumably--lurking just out of the camera's field. It was something I should keep in mind. This was suggested by such artifacts as a pipe (a pertinent prop, since Hefner himself smokes one) or a second cup on the coffee table or a man's hat on a chair. In a few examples Hefner showed me in Playboy volumes, the man is quite apparent (a disembodied hand coming out of the foreground to offer the Playmate a light for her cigarette); indeed, in one early centerfold, the out-of-focus figure of a man (full-length) in evening clothes is distinguishable in the background reflected in a boudoir mirror. He is standing in the bedroom door and is, in fact, Hefner himself.

Hefner said that in the early days, Playboy's legal staff began to get fidgety about such evidence of a man on the premises--it seemed too blatantly suggestive for the moral temper of those times to have all those hats, pipes, and so forth, lying about. So for a while, such evidence was removed and the girl herself was called on to provide the indication that someone else was on the scene.

"How did this work?" I asked Hefner.

"Well, it was a question of putting the girl to some activity to make sure the reader felt she had something on her mind . . . and I'm not talking about feeding the family cat."

He opened a volume of Playboy and pointed to a centerfold in which an astonishingly pretty girl was tearing up a copy of TV Guide.

"Now, that girl is not tearing up TV Guide because she likes to tear up TV Guides," he said. "She is tearing up TV Guide because she doesn't want to watch TV. She's got something else on her mind."

"Of course," I said.

"It's something to consider for your picture. Have you got any idea of what your gatefold girl might have on her mind?" he asked.

"Not really," I said. "We have an idea to have a horse on the premises."

"A horse?" Hefner arched his eye-brows. "Well, that will be a first."

"I suppose if I want to suggest that a male is on the premises, I should have two horses," I said. "The other could have a rifle stock sticking out of the saddlebag and maybe a man's hat hanging from the pommel. The guy's gone off to pick her a spray of wildflowers or something."

"I'll leave you with it," Hefner said. "It's a very heavy problem."

The next morning--having received word from Kauffman that further dalliance didn't fit his scheduling of the feature--Marilyn and I decided on a girl named Kevyn Taylor for my gatefold. She had been one of the girls presented at the meeting I had attended--Hefner had bent over the plastic transparency holders with his eyepiece and remarked how solemn she was ("Couldn't they get this girl to look a little happier about things?"), and finally he had turned to something else.

Marilyn showed me the sheet. The girl had been posed indoors, indeed solemn, but her body was long and tanned, the sunlight from a window caught in her hair, and it was a petulance about her rather than solemnity, like a tomboy forced to take a violin lesson on a summer's day. Marilyn and I agreed that we could imagine her standing in tall grass with or without a horse. She'd be happier out there.

I went through a crash course on the 8 x 10 Deardorff, the camera model every photographer had warned me about with the same sort of wry affection a dog owner has for his elkhound. "It's an absolute monster," they had said delightedly.

The Deardorff looks like what is remembered by anyone who has had a formal picture taken in a studio--a large boxlike mahogany-colored camera on a thick-legged tripod; it comes equipped with a black sheet, which the photographer drapes over his head as he peers through the back of the camera at the focusing screen on which the subject appears, I discovered to my dismay, upside down.

"Why?" I asked. "Why don't they put in a mirror that straightens it out? How can I do much with a girl and a horse, both of whom appear to be suspended from their feet?"

"The Deardorff works exactly as your eye does," I was told. "The eye transmits an image that is upside down and the brain makes the proper adjustment."

I remembered the principle from school, though it was not one I believed truly, never feeling the physical strain of what the "adjustment" must do to the brain cells involved. My brother, who was a year younger, agreed. "A thing like that would hurt," he said.

In recent years, the photographers' problems with the Deardorff have been eased somewhat, because now it is possible to take a Polaroid test shot through the Deardorff to check the focus, the lens opening and the pose of the subject. Still, a considerable difficulty with the Deardorff (as I understood it) was the extremely defined and shallow field of focus--so that it was all right for the girl to move from side to side, but if she leaned forward just slightly, her nose or the tip of her breast, say, would slide into fuzziness.

I spent an evening with Kevyn over dinner. She took a night off from her job at The Playboy Club in Century City. Kevyn had been raised in the East, in Maryland . . . 16 years of the most conventional of lifestyles until her family had moved to California. There, attracted by the looser attitudes of her generation. Kevyn rebelled ("just for the sake of rebelling") and she "went into everything"--leaving home to join the nomadic wanderings (mainly on the beaches along the stretch of California) of the flower children, and to join the love-ins and the music festivals and the reading of Hesse and Siddhartha. "I had a lot of hard changes. I was always moving on. I didn't dare find myself in one place too long." She showed me a picture of herself then--a gamin's sullen face staring at the camera, slightly chubbier, a schoolgirl's fat, and beside her a boy with an arm across her shoulder and looking offcamera with a slight smirk of possession.

"Finally, when I was nineteen, I began mellowing out," she said.

I had not heard the phrase before. "You what?"

"Mellowed out. Not scientifically but emotionally. I got tuned in to nature and it made me think more rationally. Mostly. I just sat out there on the cliffs and thought. It gave me this terrific, like, pleasure to know that no one knew what I was doing--that I could sit on the cliff in the Big Sur and look up at an airplane going over and know that no one up there was thinking about a girl sitting on a cliff thinking. . . ."

"That's very nice." I said.

"The best time I ever had was hiking naked through the Big Sur with a girlfriend."

My heart jumped. "Naked?"

"She wore boots and socks. I wore leather shoes."

"Did anyone ever see you?" I asked.

She looked at me curiously. "Once," she said. "Some guy and his wife saw us--a couple hiking out there along the pine trails. The guy looked up and saw me standing there. It must have surprised him."

"Yes, yes. I know what that's about." I said. "Exactly! I don't suppose you had a horse with you . . . ?"

"A horse?"

"Well, we'll leave the horse out," I said. "It was too complicated, anyway. And maybe those leather shoes. We'll leave those off."

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "But I suppose it will be all right."

"It will be absolutely fine," I said.