The Girls of the New South

Are you Ready, Gentlemen? We're about to reveal the best-kept secret in sexual America. Which is: Southern women are more liberal, more relaxed, more, uh, willing. Behind that mythic facade of the untouchable Southern belle, the crinolined china doll on the pedestal of chivalry, the virginal child bride, are the real women of the New South--the freest and friendliest females this side of Marina del Rey.

There is nothing new about beautiful Southern women; what with the passing of pellagra and the boll weevil, they're the oldest thing about the New South. What we didn't know is how liberated they have become. Listen to Ron Hudspeth, an Atlanta Journal sports columnist who travels frequently to all the major-league cities of the country:

"It's a big myth that Southern women are more conservative. I've found the women in New York and other Northern cities more uptight. They have a protective outer shell. But here, you can meet girls in an elevator or on the street. If you spoke to a girl that way in the North, she'd be scared to death."

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Maybe it's those hot, humid nights. Maybe they're our Mediterraneans. Whatever the reason, Southern women are clearly more relaxed about their socializing and bed partners than their Northern counterparts. What better way to find out than to ask Yankee transplants? Over a drink or three at Pat O'Brien's, the bar and drinking garden in New Orleans, a Northern lady who moved South two years ago explained it: "Moralitywise, Southern women are very, very loose. They're more direct about what they want. There are no holds barred."

Or witness the ire of a cute, blonde dental hygienist from Indiana who now works in Atlanta: "Southern women are so aggressive! They spoil the men! With the ratio here, about four girls to every guy, the men know that if one girl says no, it takes only about five minutes to find another one who will say yes." Welcome to the New South.

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Playboy Staff Photographer David Chan met many Virginia girls during last year's shooting of our popular Girls of Washington pictorial (Playboy, September 1976). Then he carried his lights and cameras to Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans for this look at the new ladies of the New South. "A lot of them come from smaller towns around the South," says Chan. "But you also meet many girls from the North who came down for a visit and decided to stay. They like the warm weather and easy atmosphere."

Southern boom towns such as Atlanta have attracted young people from all over the country. Moe Turcotte moved from Maine to Atlanta, where he is now catering manager at the posh West Paces Racquet Club off Peachtree Road. He says: "I've met more Maine girls here than I ever met in Maine. Hell, in New England, a girl walking down the street won't even talk to you. In Atlanta, that same girl will smile and talk and not feel bad about it."

Northern girls who move South say they slow down, shed their armor and open up to the good and easy pace. Stacy Ambrose, an assistant personnel manager, moved from her native New Jersey to New Orleans. She says, "I would never move back North. It's so relaxed here. When you walk into a disco, it's more romantic, a plantation atmosphere with a lot of wood. In the North, it's harsh, with all lights and glass. Here I can let everything loose and be myself."

In case you haven't heard, Jimmy Carter has let it out that the South is the place to be these days. Kirkpatrick Sale warned us that the South would rise again in Power Shift, a book that noted the population drift (and resultant political shift) from the Northeast and Midwest into the Sun-belt states. In the first half of this decade, the South's head count went up 5,300,000, more than the country's three other regions combined. More and more companies have discovered the good life of free outdoor tennis, mild winters, cheap parking and those all-day smiles; hence, they have transferred headquarters to places like Atlanta and Houston. One executive told us, "Now that we're in Atlanta, all the field reps want to move to headquarters. When we were still in New York, a man would tell me his wife threatened divorce if he were transferred to headquarters."

Trekking after the sun has spurred the much-touted Southern business and real-estate boom of the past 15 years. That has generated a huge demand for young professionals--doctors, bankers and lawyers out of such university towns as Tuscaloosa, Athens and Baton Rouge--and young women in secretarial, teaching and nursing slots, not to mention hundreds of jobs in the new taverns and restaurants. More and more Southern women, too, are striking out into law and medicine professionally: There are currently 222 women in a student body of 742 at Emory University Law School in Atlanta. The striking number of women prominent in Jimmy Carter's Administration--Barbara Blum of Atlanta, Patt Derian of Mississippi and Betty Rainwater of Atlanta--will have a symbolic effect for other young Southern women.

All of this has made Atlanta into a young man's town. Most of Atlanta's political and business leadership is under 45, with an emphasis on developing youth. Maynard Jackson, the mayor, is 39; Richard Kattel, chairman and president of C&S National Bank, the city's largest (assets: three billion dollars), is 40. John Portman, the architect and developer, was only 39 when he opened Atlanta's stunning Hyatt Regency, with its 22-story atrium lobby and shaftless, space-bubble elevators, the style that has revolutionized hotel design in America. Portman's latest addition to the Atlanta skyline is the 73-story, 1100-room Peach-tree Plaza, the world's tallest hotel.

Stroll down Peachtree Street on a springtime lunch hour and you'll get the message better than we can tell it. If you arrive by noon, you might cadge a spot on the concrete benches in the middle of Peachtree Center, the office-and-hotel complex John Portman has developed atop Peachtree Ridge--the heart of town. This is the prime girl-watching seat in the city, since these office towers disgorge the most and the best of Atlanta's typewriter corps every day at lunch. While expense-account types head for the elegant, Danish-style Midnight Sun restaurant in the plaza below, the younger set lines up for wine and cheese carry-outs or hot dogs sold in the adjacent self-service café--another no-miss girl gathering spot at lunch time. By this time of year, they've begun showing shoulder (and sometimes much more) in the South, so amble down to Central City Park at Five Points, vortex of the financial district. Here, dozens of young lovelies take a sandwich and Coke (the South's other gift to the world, besides beautiful women and politicians) and spread out on grassy hillocks to worship the sun while they eat.

One thing you will notice right away is that there are more of them than there are of you. Next to Washington, Atlanta has the most favorable male-female ratio of any city in the country. Don't ask where we got the figures; just believe us. Call it grass-roots research.

Atlanta ladies are predominantly drawn from the Deep South tier of South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama--plus Florida. This is ethnically unretouched Anglo-Saxon country, whence all the blue-eyed blondes with Scottish-Irish names. They bring along deep Southern drawls as well, but often lose them to the flatter, more cosmopolitan Atlanta accent. Native Atlanta girls usually have only a faint Southern accent. Maybe this is because the carpetbagging never stopped, but today nobody minds the influx of Northern business and, consequently, many women from New York and the Midwest. Some-how in Atlanta, we seemed to meet more ladies from Ohio than any other non-Southern state: schoolteachers, nurses, secretaries. Many blacks with ancestral roots in the South are also returning to Atlanta for college and jobs (particularly with the airlines).

Atlanta, like Houston, Dallas and Miami, has strongly adopted the California lifestyle of the early Sixties, i.e., apartment complexes. Some of them are "stew zoos" on the South Side near the airport (there are 2840 stewardesses stationed in Atlanta by Delta, Eastern and Southern). Others are sprinkled around the lush, green hills--the butt of the Appalachian chain--that form the northern boundary of the city. Most of the apartments--such as Riverbend on the meandering Chattahoochee River and nearby Tree Top Apartments, set among piny knolls--feature all the accouterments of singles life at no extra cost to the tenants: several swimming pools, tennis courts, multipurpose clubhouse with weight rooms, game rooms and about three noisy beer blasts per week, for which men may pay up to three dollars' admission (ladies half price or free). During the spring and summer, the real weekend action is around the big pools; a common pastime for guys on the prowl is "pool hopping" around the perimeter complexes.

Southern fun is often loud fun, since half those coat-and-tie professionals are really only one generation removed from gas-station beer guzzlers like President Carter's brother, Billy. All the country in them comes out one hot Saturday in May, when hundreds of crazies in assorted stages of undress and inebriation gather 9.2 miles upriver from the Riverbend apartments for what is dubiously called The Ramblin' Raft Race. There is a crude semblance of organization by racing classes, but basically, people will put into the frigid mountain water anything that floats, including several six-packs and their own rear ends.

Somehow, they all come out of the river several miles later. Nobody makes this trip without female company; Southern girls gladly suffer all the whooping and more than hold their own in the beer-consumption field.

By night, Atlanta is, quite simply, a pickup paradise. For early after-work drinks, the classiest watering hole is Mimi's, an exquisitely designed bar and restaurant overhanging the skating rink in the starkly futuristic new Omni International office and hotel center. Mimi's combination of cypress-stump tables, Italian-marble bar and leather-and-fabric pillow seats exudes an elegance that has attracted the dressiest crowd and flashiest women in a city otherwise given to rather relaxed clothing styles.

A comfortable halfway station between downtown and the outskirts is Harrison's on Peachtree Road, with two bars, a restaurant and a game room housed in an old dry cleaner's convincingly converted by a lovely collection of English and Scottish antiques. Harrison's is named for William Henry Harrison, the legendary Confederate colonel who, when shot on that spot during the Battle of Atlanta, had the good grace before expiring to toast his wife with the last dram from his brandy flask. Things are kind of like that in Harrison's: lots of ladies, lots of toasting.

Later in the evening, the emphasis shifts to the discos and bars on the northern edge (your own wheels are a must for an Atlanta prowl). Crowley's Brandy House is a favorite spot for drinking and burgers; T.G.I. Friday's is an all-purpose food and beverage emporium with a large, accessible collection of ladies from the nearby apartment complexes, who lean on the outside rail around the large, four-sided bar; Charley Magruder's pub and Flanigan's disco are the hot spots in the Powers Ferry Shopping Center; flashier strobe-lighted discos are Jeryl's and Xanadu, near the perimeter highway; live music and dancing are available in the Sundown apartment complex.

After hours in Atlanta means more or less after midnight, though all establishments may now remain open until four o'clock. After 12, the action moves closer in, to the near-northeast side: The Place on Paces is a very casual eating and drinking spot packed with jeans and long dresses alike; the huge, highly wired Electric Ballroom in the old Georgian Terrace Hotel is the best spot for good, loud, live rock music in a room with two bars, booths and tables and lots of wandering room--you can be outright weird here; the intimate Casbah disco on Peachtree is the favorite of the late-night, chic-clothes set; the Pharr Library is a more subdued, straighter establishment (no jeans); Rose's Cantina, hard by the Georgia Tech campus, is the downright funkiest spot in town, serving an odd, extremely successful combination of Tex-Mex food, live bluegrass, country or jazz music, and four pool tables, all in a single room (long hair and jeans here); Twenty Seven Birds off Piedmont Road is the final hustle of the evening, where true night owls of all persuasions gather for a last drink and last look-around.

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Nashville, set high on the rolling Cumberland Plateau of middle Tennessee, is the most enduringly Southern of the cities we visited. True, the capital of country has gone slick, but the city has retained a small-town provincialism that is more charming than stifling. It requires a step down in pace, a retuning of the ear to heavy Tennessee accents and a shedding of fancy threads for more straightforward jeans and jackets. Nashville's outside influences have come mainly from farther south and from Southern California, so the predominant cast of the female population is, again, Anglo-Saxon. They are unpretentious in dress styles and straightforward in manner. "Tennessee girls are like Colorado girls--friendly and open," says Joe Overstreet, a Nashville sales rep who also checks I.D.s at Luv's, the busiest late-night disco in town (minimum drinking age: 18).

"Nashville ladies love to get loaded!" We had to ask twice to be sure we heard that right. It was the voice of Nashvillian Vicki Stinnett, 18, talking over beer in a Nashville pub. "I think the ladies around here are the best--free and easy to be with." We think she's right. The next thing she did was offer to buy us a beer, of which huge quantities are consumed in the South.

The primary entertainment and meeting center of Nashville is one block of Elliston Place near the Vanderbilt University campus. The well-known T.G.I. Friday's chain has the largest, busiest bar-cum-restaurant, decorated in the usual circus of funk--musical instruments on the wall, a rotating fan atop an eight-foot column, a spiraling barber pole, a typically Nashvillian On the Air sign blinking on and off. Waiters in red-and-white-striped shirts cover 40 tables, while the drinking crowd jams in between the bar and a stand-up drinking ledge six feet away. "What makes it easy to meet girls in here," confided one well-oiled Vanderbilt student, "is that you're already pressed up against them when you walk in."

Down the block is another favorite, The Gold Rush, a Western saloon with two bars and a game room. Across the street are an oysters-and-beer establishment called One Eyed Jack's (we never met Jack to confirm that) and the Exit/In, the best live-music center in town, with the likes of John Prine, Al Kooper and occasional country stars entertaining. Another favorite Elliston Place meeting arena serves no drinks at all: The Discount Records store, upstairs, and Union Blues head shop, downstairs, afford natural hangouts for the college set.

Moving away from Elliston Place, one can make a nostalgic pass on Broadway, where Tootsie's Orchid Lounge was once the hangout of Opry stars, before they migrated to new digs in the suburbs. Nearby Printer's Alley now specializes in strippers and music for an older set. Toward midnight, the hot spot on West End Avenue is Luv's, a large bar-cum-disco with game room and lots of ladies who love to dance. Lessons on Wednesday nights. Dress very informal. The business-suit crowd heads for dinner and disco to Smuggler's Inn on Murfreesboro Road, or to the Starlight on Dickinson Road, a haven for 30s and up. Near the airport, the post-teeny-boppers gather at the aptly named Cockpit, which brings in live bands during the week but converts to disco on Monday nights. Last call is around 2:30 A.M. in Nashville; after three, the folks who have been serving you all evening head toward the fair-grounds to Sheri's, which serves the best cheeseburgers and sponsors both volley-ball and darts matches until dawn. "Sometimes, I just lay back in a chaise longue on their terrace and watch the sun come up," says Luv's Joe Overstreet.

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Memphis is the unsung up-and-coming city of the New South. While Nashville is the capital of country, Memphis' even older reputation as the citadel of the blues has been revived by such local recording stars as Isaac Hayes, the Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas and Albert King. Elvis Presley still records in his home in Memphis. The last major city on the Mississippi before the river flows to New Orleans, Memphis combines small-town comforts (low rents, green hills nearby) with city entertainment. It is the only smaller Southern city with a post-season college football game, the Liberty Bowl.

Memphis has become the commercial hub of west Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. This has drawn young women into the city from all over the region, mostly for clerical jobs and the upward mobility of big-city life. The main employers are banks, brokerage houses and the city-county government, all located either downtown or in the new office buildings of East Memphis. The ladies' accents here are strongly Southern.

Everything we've ever heard about Southern girls seems true--more feminine, somewhat conservative dressers, less educated, more deferential to men in conversation and argument--only some-how it is all different. It has been noted that Southern girls tend to marry younger (and divorce younger), but it must also be understood that they have a fierce strongheaded streak, too, which may account for their recent rapid liberation from the sexual bonds of Protestant puritanism. "I'm very independent," explains Gail Stanton, 22. who is a computer programmer. "Southern women used to be brought up to lean on a man--but I don't need that crutch. We're not little Scarlett O'Haras anymore. The South has changed."

"There's no question the girls here are friendlier, more easygoing," says Robert Vanelli, the bearded disc jockey at Chesterfield's, a low-key bar-cum-disco on Poplar Avenue in East Memphis. "I was in Denver, New Jersey and Philadelphia before I came back to Memphis, and the girls I met tended to get more nervous and uptight. Maybe it's that cold weather. I once spent a weekend on a Northern campus, and the girls were sort of suspicious at first. They think it's cute to listen to the way I talk, but that's about as open as they get."

Chesterfield's is typical of Southern watering holes in two respects: The emphasis is on a relaxed atmosphere, in which it is easy to meet and talk with people, rather than on fancy light shows and flashy decor; and the drinks are reasonable--$1 for beer, $1.50 for booze, no admission, no minimum (if there is no live music).

Next door to Chesterfield's is Wellington's, with perhaps the best live rock acts in town. Admission there is two dollars, for which you get an entry stamp on the back of your hand, in the atavistic style of the high school sock hop. This is a listening place except between sets, when dancing music is played. There are dozens of tables, but people on the prowl line the long bar or head for the game corner in the back of the room.

A bit farther east is Memphis' newest evening spot, an elegant, dressy bar-disco called Elan. Though nominally a private club, a number of free memberships were handed out when Elan opened a few months ago to attract a more moneyed crowd. These are the spiffiest ladies in town, right down to the barmaids, smartly turned out in dark pants and amply filled white sweaters. Mary Curran, from Savannah, Georgia, was one of those behind the bar when we walked in. "It's fun being a Southern woman. I think Southern women are wilder than Northern women. If there's something we want to do, we do it." Maybe she's biased, but she looked good enough to believe.

If the night owl hears a stomach growl during this tour, he can walk right downstairs from Elan to Clark Station, an attractive beef-and-shrimp restaurant done in the fashion of an old railroad car. Tables are discreetly spaced and couples abound.

Memphis' other major entertainment center is Overton Square, a gaggle of eating, drinking and shopping spots centered on a closed street that serves as a mall. For live music, there is the Bombay Bicycle Club, but for out-right action, T.G.I. Friday's is wall-to-wall availables.

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The first thing you see when you step off the plane at New Orleans International Airport is a portable cocktail bar, which is conveniently set up wherever there are arriving flights. They don't care when or where you drink in New Orleans--just so you drink. The only drinking law they seem to have is to do it. No city in America is as dedicated to the pure pursuit of pleasure as this one.

Walking through the old French Quarter, you might think all this revelry is wayward tourists letting their hair down far from home. Wrong: Travel out to Metairie, New Orleans' inner suburb, and you'll find Fat City, an unplanned hodgepodge of neon and brick that now houses over 50 bars, restaurants, discos and live-music halls, booming with business from the natives. Few tourists make it out to Fat City, which lacks the outward charm of the French Quarter. But this is where many of the local ladies are to be found, lining the bar at Sancho Panza, sitting in small groups at the tables in The Godfather or The Place, leaning on the brass rails at P.O.E.T.S., coming in for a four-A.M. snack at Vito's. The live-music spots frown on jeans, charge $2 admission and about $1.75 for drinks.

New Orleans, more than any other place in the country, is an after-hours city. Some of the spots in Fat City bring on a second band or a new jam group at 3:30 A.M. They play until seven, when the clubs close and people drift over for beignets (doughnuts) and coffee with chicory to the famous Morning Call Coffee Stand, sadly moved from the old French Market but now thriving in Fat City.

And New Orleans is different from the rest of the country in other ways. First of all, they talk different: It is not Southern, not Northern, not Cajun, though one part of each of those. In Atlanta, they say "New Or-leens"; in New Orleans, they say "New Ah-lins." There is a broad flatness of speech that sometimes sounds like a Bronx accent. Whatever, it is infectious; newcomers find themselves picking it up faster than any other regional speech pattern. Maybe it goes with the live oaks, bamboo and banana trees that seem to dot every courtyard.

New Orleans is a polyglot town--the Acadians, the French, the Spanish and the English all held sway at some point in the city's history, and the German, Irish and Italian influences followed. Hence the ladies are of a cosmopolitan mix: Anglo-Saxon beauties from the Irish Channel and Garden District; dark-complexioned Italian girls from French Market and night-club families; smoky Creole ladies from the French-Cajun towns between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Since the partying--that's New Orleansan for going out, drinking, having fun--does not start until so late, what's to do early? The French Quarter spots (too many for a rundown) often feature happy hours with free drinks for women--yes, free--and prices as low as 50 or 75 cents for men. Pat O'Brien's is the biggest, busiest and youngest, with a strongly collegiate clientele. A chic spot is La Boucherie, with an upstairs disco and free ladies' night on Thursdays; the spill-over spot is Lautrec (on Toulouse Street, natch), with restaurant, lovely courtyard tables beside an oyster bar, plus dancing and pool tables upstairs. The Original Melius Bar is egalitarian about its happy hour: free hors d'oeuvres and 25-cent beer for everyone from five to eight, weeknights, except Wednesday, when the happy hour extends for as long as the people are happy.

Halfway between the French Quarter and the Tulane University campus on St. Charles Street are two more sedate, very comfortable discos that pass up the gimmicks but attract a large clientele. Trinitys is the more student-oriented, with a downstairs disco dance floor and a big-screen newsreel and old-movie show upstairs in the game room. A place called The Forty-One Forty-One, because that is its address on St. Charles Street, reaches for a dressier, more moneyed crowd. Something's working: There were beautiful ladies at the bars upstairs and down and in the courtyard's winterized porch when we visited the place. "We've got people with money in here, so we get the best-looking ladies," said owner Charles Dietrich.

Jeff Seligman, a young businessman who recently moved from Atlanta back to his native New Orleans, characterized the difference: "New Orleans is more conservative than Atlanta, without the influx of young people from all over, but it is a much funkier town. You can party all night if you want, and that is hard to find in Atlanta. There are really dynamite-looking ladies here. New Orleans just has a character that is hard to describe unless you live here."

Debbie Gurch, a transplanted Northerner, put it more bluntly: "We're looser in New Orleans, because we drink more. So you party more. Southern guys are much more into buying a girl drinks than in the North. Up there, they're too busy trying to be classy."

They always told us the South would rise again, but no one quite anticipated it would happen the way it has. With the peanut farmer in the White House, Southerners, both native and adoptive, are feeling a mite chauvinistic about their magnolia-and-sunshine existence. They're enjoying every minute of the attention they're getting, and we enjoyed every minute of the attention we gave. Go South, young man, and enjoy.

"Northern girls who move South say they open up to the good and easy pace."