The Girls of Washington

Could it just be that Washington, our drab, monumental political capital, is the true unsung girl capital of America? Even more than L.A., the Big Apple or swinging Atlanta?

David Chan, our peripatetic playboy Staff Photographer who has photographed the girls of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, was amazed; Last winter, he received calls at his hotel from more than 900 ladies of greater Washington who wanted to pose for our pictorial. "I've never seen anything like it," says Chan. "I've photographed the girls of many cities, but I've never had such a variety of really beautiful girls who wanted to be in the magazine. In other cities, the women might be actresses or (text continued on page 175)The Girls of Washington(continued on page 123) models, or maybe they do nothing. But in Washington, they all seem to have a career, a goal."

Hardly had Chan unpacked his Hasselblad and announced his whereabouts than his phone heated up. "I was scheduling them every 15 minutes," remembers Chan, who worked 12-hour days during his first visit to the capital.

Washington, we found, is literally blossoming with lovely ladies. The Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies tells us there are 162,000 single, widowed, divorced and separated females between the ages of 20 and 34 in the greater metropolitan area--the equivalent of the entire population of Hartford, Connecticut, or Springfield, Massachusetts.

Like all the world's great capitals--London, Paris, Vienna, Rome--ours exerts an apparently irresistible attraction not only for the country's best and brightest but also for its most beautiful. More than ever before, politics in America is showbiz. Just look at what Robert Redford is doing these days--going around the country on film as Bob Woodward in All the President's Men, a movie about what they do in Washington. Watergate, for all its nastiness, conclusively put D.C. on the glamor map as a springboard to the national limelight. Careers are made and broken here; politicians, journalists and even some hapless secretaries (Nixon's Rose Mary Woods, for example) see their names in lights. Senator Sam Ervin, flappy-jowled and 77, became a cult figure. Henry Kissinger, short, nearsighted and given to a slight paunch, is, believe it or not, a sex symbol. The girls of Washington follow the spotlight, trekking to Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue the way they used to patrol the theater district off Broadway or line up before the studio gates in Hollywood. After the gala world premiere of All the President's Men at the elegant new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last spring, Washington began to be called Hollywood East. None less than pop pioneer Andy Warhol descended from smuggest Manhattan to proclaim the people of Washington "so attractive, so good-looking. . . . All the people who should have gone into the movies are coming here."

The ladies come from everywhere. You hear Midwest and magnolia accents; you see the colorations of Minnesota, Miami and Malibu Beach; you sense the commingling of the American melting pot--German, French, Irish, African, Chinese, English, Japanese, Scandinavian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Russian. The Washington female is light and dark, tall and short, Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, and yet peculiarly Washingtonian.

Most of all, the Washington girl is a working girl. Government jobs dominate the field--from secretaries in Congress to computer-systems analysts at the Control Data Institute. But she does everything--waitressing in a French restaurant or writing legislation that affects your corner lunch counter. She may be a lawyer, a legal secretary, a Congresswoman, a commercial artist, a television researcher, a picture editor at National Geographic, an accountant, a lobbyist. Or she may be a coed: 22,000 of them are full-time students at area colleges, from the huge University of Maryland in College Park to tiny Mount Vernon College on fancy Foxhall Road, where Susan Ford goes to school.

Of course, the 19 ladies you see on these pages were attracted to the capital for widely varying reasons. You know Elizabeth Ray from her celebrated career as a Congressman's mistress and author of the new book The Washington Fringe Benefit. She was a buxom blonde beauty from North Carolina who pursued masculine political power with the most traditional of a woman's skills--and apparently got what she was looking for. Raisa Scriabine, 26, is a statuesque blonde of rather different origins: She was born in Germany of Russian parents who emigrated to the U. S. The third cousin of Russian composer Alexander Scriabine, Raisa is now the U. S. Department of the Interior's translator for common Soviet-American wildlife preservation projects, and no wonder: She speaks English, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Hindi. She translates for all visiting official Russian wildlife experts and even helped one team of Russian scientists capture 40 musk oxen in Alaska last year. Raisa has a weekly radio program on ecology and when this was written, she was in Moscow, translating for a team of visiting U. S. environmental officials. Though she does not speak Chinese, Raisa obviously had no trouble communicating with Chinese-Canadian Playboy Staff Photographer Chan. "She was fabulous," he says. "One of the most intelligent women I ever photographed." Raisa says she likes sensuous, honest men "with originality, intelligence and masculine gentleness."

Playboy Stylist Chris Bartholome, who assisted Chan during the shootings, also noticed a difference: "Washington is the kind of city where, if you're pretty, you've also got to have a brain. Someone with political power doesn't want a dumb broad on his arm who might come out with an inappropriate comment at an embassy dinner."

Bartholome--herself a single woman--talked with almost 100 girls of Washington while helping them prepare for the photo sessions. "They told me the Watergate publicity had showed them there really were a lot of powerful and wealthy men in Washington," she says. And many revealed to her a secret longing to shatter Washington's reputation as the capital of practiced boredom and stuffy conservatism. "A lot of the girls were excited about giving people a little shock," remembers Chris. "They said, 'Just wait till the guys back at the office see this. They think I'm so strait-laced and staid.' " In some cases, alas, the guys at the office won't see anything: Two women who work for the CIA and one in the Justice Department were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they went through with their final shootings with Playboy.

"In a way, everybody there is very tired of politics," says Chan. "They want to break out into something different. When they found out Playboy was in town, a lot of people saw it as a chance for a change, a little excitement. They made us celebrities everywhere we went. Washington really opened its arms and hearts to us." Its homes, too: Several Washingtonians offered gorgeous digs as settings for the photo sessions. Prominent hairdresser Jean-Pierre Sarfati gave Chan the keys to his four-story French-style mansion in Georgetown, where the pictures of Valerie Ashley and Candace Kruse were shot. A few months later, none other than Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward bought the house.

In spring and summer, Washington's leafy parks and broad avenues make the city a bird watcher's paradise--especially at lunchtime. Pass the noon hour in stately Lafayette Park opposite the White House and you'll believe. Said one awestruck fellow, gawking at the stunning female brown baggers there: "They must fly them in for lunch." Washington is also the quintessential cafeteria town; and if you have a Government I.D., the best one around is in the New Executive Office Building. More accessible are Kay's Sandwich Shoppe, The House of Rothschild and the Senate cafeterias--all jammed with lovely ladies from 12 noon until two o'clock.

Look around on Capitol Hill, overrun with attractive administrative and legislative aides, receptionists and interns from the 50 states who are gaining experience (all kinds, we hear) in the offices of their Representative or Senator. Nothing in Washington impresses quite like power. But familiarity with the city's main game--politics--puts the Washington girl slightly on the defensive at first acquaintance. She doesn't buy lines easily, but once she warms up, you'll find her as friendly and liberated as her counterparts from the golden West with the permanent all-over tans.

The Washington girl's career is important and probably the main reason she came to the capital. In the Sixties, she might have come for The Cause; in the Seventies, it's for The Challenge. Now that she no longer gets gassed on the Mall by John Mitchell's SS, she is probably working for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She is usually up on what's happening--perhaps a strip-mining bill coming out of committee, a new exhibit at the Renwick Gallery or the Redskins' strategy for the following Sunday--and prefers friends who are up on things, too. Bright, informed and beautiful, the newly arrived Washingtonian may not move immediately into the old-guard drawing rooms of Georgetown, but she can often be found at Embassy Row soirees and National Day lawn parties, which are easier to crash than the P.T.A. picnic in Peoria.

At night, action focuses on the neighborhood near 19th and M streets, N.W., and Dupont Circle, which has Rocky Racoon (Tex-Mex menu and music of the folk-rock-country variety), Bixby's Warehouse (the new owners are promising a Maxwell's Plum of a place), Harold's Rogue & Jar (with its rotating roster of jazz) and The Childe Harold (a bar with blues and sometimes bluegrass).

Along Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E., on Capitol Hill, after-workers throng a saloon called Jenkins Hill (that's the real name of Capitol Hill), the Hawk'n Dove, Duddington's, Mike Palm's Restaurant and, near Georgetown University Law Center a few blocks away, The Chancery.

The naughtiest neighborhood is the 14th Street strip, but wise men avoid it. (Wilbut Mills did not.) According to an old adage, the girls may get stripped, but the guys get clipped. Of course, if you really want to meet a lady plainclothes cop, this is the place.

The best night district is Georgetown, which retains some of the swagger and raucousness of its seafaring era. (It was a vital port long before Pierre L'Enfant laid out Washington.) Today, there's a nonstop parade along M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, its main arteries, with a multitude of restaurants, bars and discos providing side shows. You can be part of the Georgetown scene just by sitting on the sidewalk jawing with the bauble and flower vendors, but your chances of engaging an engaging lady in conversation are better in a Clyde's or a Nathan's. Clyde's is the P. J. Clarke's of the capital, the top of the heap in terms of authentic saloon atmosphere, drinks, food (hefty bacon cheeseburgers and omelets are featured) and appealing patrons, even if many are right out of a William Hamilton cartoon. Stuart Davidson and John Laytham, the owners of Clyde's, have created a similar sort of mating mecca in the 120-year-old Old Ebbitt Grill, a block from the White House. Nathan's clientele is a bit more down to earth, even though everybody seems to be wearing sunglasses--not necessarily because they're famous, although this was Mo Dean's favorite hangout.

Chadwick's, more remote under the Whitehurst Freeway, is big with postgrads; and C. R. Higgins, a new place, draws the kind of girl who's a devotee of avocados and spinach. Gunchers is for pinball wizards and grinders fans; and The Guards, with fireplaces and wing chairs, is a determinedly stylish singles lair. For a view of the passing parade along Wisconsin Avenue, barflies opt for window-stool perches at The Third Edition.

Discos are everywhere. Most share the same features: strobes, postage-stamp dance floors and very sexy ladies delivering the drinks. Among the Georgetown hot spots: Boccaccio, F. Scott's, Winstons (Susan Ford's hangout), Tramp's, Sazerac and Le Club Zanzibar (art deco and deliciously seductive). For high-tone café society, try the Pisces Club, if you have a friend who belongs, or Foxtrappe, a popular private club whose membership is principally but not exclusively upper-class black.

Whether it's the lure of the lifestyle, the stirring of ambition or just an urge to pull up stakes and try something different, it seems likely that girls in numbers will keep right on streaming into Washington. So much for Charles Dickens, who observed in his American Notes, gathered in 1842: "Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely to flow at any time toward such dull and sluggish water."

Mr. Dickens, you were here 134 years too soon.