You've Seen her in those Winston ads, svelte in tube top and sailor jeans, her long hair streaming in the (studio) wind. You may also have seen her trotting on horseback in the British Sterling TV spots, a bottle of the touted cologne on a silver tray precariously balanced in one hand. Or in any one of two dozen other television commercials Barbara Leigh has done.
Barbara is back. Three and a half years ago (Playboy, May 1973), clad for die most part in only a Navaho concho belt, long-legged Barbara was "Indian!" the girl in our pictorial about her Cherokee origins. This month we find her in the (text concluded on page 203)Natural Leigh(continued from page 85) more urban setting of Hollywood, where she has become a successful model and budding actress. She has landed the title role in Hammer Films' Vampirella, a movie about a girl whose spaceship drops her to Earth in the form of a bat (all bats should transmogrify into Barbara Leighs). While she was waiting out the final casting, she kept busy writing her own screenplay called Dracula, a variation of the Transylvania legend.
"I've always been fascinated with vampires," says Barbara, who saw her first Dracula movie when she was 12. "I used to sleep with a cross around my neck or a Bible on my bed. But there was something very sexy about Dracula--the way he hypnotized his women."
For Barbara, posing nude is a creative art. "The naked body is like beautiful sculpture," she says. "You look at the great art of the past, the old churches and temples, they depicted nude women."
Nude sculpting obviously comes easily to Miss Leigh, an advanced hatha-yoga student: "I'm double-jointed. I can do anything with my body." Indeed. She recently posed in 45 yoga positions for a brochure on the subject.
It is not by tooling around Beverly Hills (she lives in next-door Westwood) in her Mercedes 250 that Barbara maintains her figure. Instead, she bikes 11 to 15 miles a day, plying the route from Santa Monica to Marina del Rey and back so swiftly that "most guys who try to talk to me give up after a while because they have to pedal so hard." Bike freak Barbara admits that "I'm obsessed with riding. Nothing feels better than the wind in my face and all my muscles pulling." Hmmm, yes.
After several years on the Hollywood-starlet scene, Barbara has settled down to serious work on her career. "If people think you're just a jet setter, they don't take your work seriously," she says. She rejects the fake chic of some aspects of life in Southern California.
"I don't admire the phony kind of image-playing pseudo masculinity that seems to abound in Hollywood. Most men out here fear women and try to neutralize them by sexually dominating them--or try to turn them into their mothers. Sometimes they try to do both. I really adore men. But I'm strictly one on one. My attention can't be divided. I like a quiet man who likes to share things. I love sex, but I don't want to spend all my life in bed. This is a very sexual town and that's all a lot of men think about. I'm really very modest. But if I respect a man, a lot of my inhibitions come down. 1 always used to look for a man as the answer to all problems. Now I think I have a lot to give."
