The Girl from Playboy

I'm not sure how the idea of my writing these words came up. Did I propose it in a moment of insanity, never suspecting that I'd get a go-ahead? Looking back, I guess it was my own idea, but the realization of actually doing it didn't surface until a lunch date with the magazine editors, when, suddenly, amid talk of diets, Playmates and Julia Child, we were discussing my "story"--rather an incredible happening for a girl raised in a Catholic boarding school.

It all began with my job as an editor in Playboy's Book Division. I was assigned to work on a proposed series of books called The Playboy Photographer. The idea was to feature the work of one photographer and reveal something about the man as well. As one of the earliest staff photographers hired, Pompeo Posar was a logical choice for the first book.

I set out, gathering the hundreds of photos Pompeo has done, interviewing him and watching him at work. I soon realized a few of the reasons for Pompeo's success: He's appealingly shy and disarmingly stubborn. He kept asking me to try modeling and I kept answering with a question: "Who, me?" I was sure that this was one instance when Pompeo's Italian intuition about women would prove mistaken. As for me, romping nude in front of a camera was something I would not have called me. But I'd underestimated not only Pompeo's determination but my own curiosity as well. Pompeo's reassuring manner finally got me to answer with another question: "Why not?"

At first I was alarmingly quiet and generally uptight. After a couple of shootings, though, when I'd halted the mental commotion long enough to analyze what I was feeling, I was genuinely surprised at myself. Rather than being traumatic, it had turned out to be a lot of fun. Pompeo's confidence in me helped immeasurably. Especially gratifying was being able to get in touch with my sexy self, discovering and accepting it as a full-time part of me, not as something to be conjured up only at appropriate moments. It wasn't a question of feeling more attractive or of being more attractive in the Playboy sense, nor of feeling or being more female, just more aware that I already was those things and hadn't let myself enjoy them.

Enjoying myself is what the pictures came to be about. Trusting my instincts that what was feeling good was looking good, I forgot the camera and dove into fantasies, visions of myself and phantom partners who appeared and disappeared at will. (My faith in the effectiveness of fantasies has been confirmed!)

I waited for the much-touted "sex object" feelings to arise, and occasionally they did, when some technical problem came up in a shooting and I had to be moved around. But what's expressed in these pictures was very much felt and experienced. I didn't find it necessary to objectify or create anything that didn't occur naturally. Allowing myself to feel and be sexy, being encouraged to be so and knowing that none of the usual complications would occur was really a great experience.

Doing the pictures was hard work, too, which is hard to believe. But there's a pressure for everything to be right that creates tension. It generally proves to be productive tension, triggering something vital between photographer and model. Then there's the quantum leap from doing the pictures to seeing them and thinking. Is that really me? It's sort of like vacation pictures a year later: You see yourself in them, you remember the time, what was happening when a picture was taken, but it seems incredible that you really were in Piazza San Marco in Venice or in Aunt Mabel's back yard in Alabama. Add to that the dimension of seeing photos that show you as you rarely see yourself and it becomes even more difficult. How many people get to critically examine their bodies as models do: finding faults, seeing awful expressions and once in a while--thank God--finding a pleasing shot? But I've overcome that disbelief and accept these images as being of me, but not as being me. They only begin to show me, and you've only begun to see me. There's a skinny Midwest-suburban tomboy in there, one of the first to try out for little league; the quiet, shy "everybody's friend," lifeguard-wholesome, knee socks high school girl; and the studious Phi Beta Kappa college student who was beginning at last to learn what it means to be and to feel alive. And the "career person," whom even I have only begun to see. Sometime editor, sometime writer--whoever she turns out to be, she has learned that to be alive means to want to know more about everything. Right now, there's a harp in my life, Charlie Brown, Virginia Woolf and yoga. There's collected junk, a convertible and bathtub rings. There's Shakespeare (who knows it all), dumb poems, a nondescript black dog and some fine people. I thought briefly of turning in a bunch of business cards, each carrying my name and one of my "life roles" as the copy for my story. But they would all boil down to "Kim: person," and that's really what I'm all about.