The Great Playmate Hunt

At the peak of the 25th Anniversary Playmate Hunt, a little old lady called the Governors Inn near Raleigh, North Carolina, where photographer Bill Arsenault was receiving Playmate applicants. "May I speak to Mr. Playboy?" she asked. "Can you be more specific?" asked the hotel operator. "Yes," said the lady, "I want to speak to the Devil." "I'm sorry," came the reply, "but neither party is registered here."

That Little old lady notwithstanding, nearly everybody loves Playmates. Ever since we unveiled Marilyn Monroe as our first Playmate in 1953 (under the guise of Sweetheart of the Month), we've tried to bring our readers a special kind of girl in our centerfold--a person with a rare, fresh sort of beauty that's always arresting. Faced with the task of finding our 25th Anniversary Playmate, we realized that we'd have to make an extraordinary effort. We've learned from experience that some of the most beautiful women are somewhat shy; and because so many of our Playmates in the past have said they never would have posed nude for any magazine other than Playboy, we knew that odds were that our Playmate Perfect wouldn't come to us unless she knew we were looking for her.

That's why last June, after months of planning, we launched the most massive search in our history to find the right girl. First we placed an advertisement in daily and college newspapers in 28 cities that said, in part: "Playboy is searching for a special Playmate. ... The lucky lady will receive a $25,000 modeling fee and could represent Playboy on TV and in public appearances throughout our anniversary year!" Those who consider themselves connoisseurs of Playboy beauty were offered a finder's fee of $2500 if they discovered our anniversary lady for us. Each ad included a date when a Playboy photographer would be coming to town to photograph the aspirants.

The 28 cities we selected had reputations for producing beautiful women. Among them were those you might expect: Los Angeles, New York and our home town, Chicago; but there were others not so obvious, such as Knoxville, Tennessee, and Norman, Oklahoma. In the South and Southwest, we also visited Gainesville, Miami, Tallahassee, Lexington, Raleigh, Columbia, Kansas City (Missouri), Austin, Baton Rouge and San Antonio. In the Western states, we visited Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose and Boulder. Among Midwestern cities, we also chose Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Lincoln and Columbus. In the East, we searched Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, as well as New York, and to give Canadians a chance to compete, we added Toronto.

Our teams moved into each city like a well-oiled machine; first, local media were alerted to the team's imminent arrival; then, when our photographer arrived, he did two days of nonstop interviews on television and radio. When the girls started calling Playboy's hotel suite for appointments, he and his assistants scheduled them for Polaroid picture sessions: a different candidate every ten minutes for the next four or five days. The Polaroids went back to our home office in Chicago for screening by our photo editors. Three months, thousands of miles and 10,000 Polaroids later, we had not only discovered our Playmate Perfect but rediscovered America as well.

•

We knew that Playboy was a popular magazine when we went out on our Playmate Hunt, but we had no idea how popular. The welcome we received in nearly all of the cities we visited was mind boggling. In all but a few cities, we received up-front articles in every local newspaper--more than 130 articles in all--and local as well as network news shows ran film clips of our photographers at work (with emphasis, naturally, on the subjects being photographed).

For the most part, the television coverage, though (text continued on page 208)Playmate Hunt(continued from page 194) sometimes humorous, was unabashedly enthusiastic.

The most noteworthy news spot of all appeared on WABC-TV in New York. Dwight Hooker was photographing Playmate hopefuls on the promenade-type balcony outside his 20th-floor suite in the Drake Hotel when office workers in a building nearby spotted the parade of young lovelies from their windows. As a WABC reporter put it: "Business came to a standstill." Directly across from the balcony, in a skyscraper that houses the offices of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a gaggle of men decided to make rating signs, numbered 1 to 20, which, with waving arms and shouts of encouragement, they held up to the window as each swim-suited applicant stepped out onto the balcony. The television cameramen noticed the signs (including a huge red-and-white one saying All Right!, displayed when a particularly well-put-together lady appeared) and focused on the FDIC office windows between takes of Hooker and the applicants. Spliced together with the song A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody, the cuts from balcony to rating cards made for hilarious viewing.

But the media coverage wasn't all for laughs. There was a smidgen of protest to keep us on our toes. It came from four women who claimed to represent the National Organization for Women and picketed Arsenault's hotel. The Carolina Inn, for about a half hour the second day after he arrived in Columbia, South Carolina. "At one point, there were literally twice as many reporters and news photographers covering the protest as there were protesters," Arsenault said, "so it wasn't what you'd call a massive demonstration." Perhaps the protesters couldn't instigate a boycott because they misread the minds of the entrants, most of whom already considered themselves liberated.

But no one saw the search quite the way our own photographers did. For nearly all of them, it was the most intense job they'd ever done. David Chan did interviews on eight radio stations in Toronto in a single day; by the sixth, he was almost speechless from laryngitis. Hot tea and honey in large doses enabled him to whisper his way through the last two interviews. Kerry Morris, after photographing nearly 100 girls daily for three consecutive days in San Diego, was "so punchy I could hardly stand." Arsenault, an intense and personable character, wound up working some days from eight A.M. to nine P.M. without a break or a meal. Inevitably, he came down with a devastating cold in rainy Portland, but continued despite his red eyes, stuffed-up nose and fever to snap those Polaroids every ten minutes.

Few of the girls we saw had all the right qualities for Playboy, but our photographers made a special effort to photograph each applicant with equal care. As Michael Berry put it, "You'd see the excitement in the girls' eyes and you'd just want to be as friendly as possible." When Arsenault was asked by a newspaper reporter in Portland what he would do if a 500-pound woman came in, he replied: "I figure she might have a 500-pound boyfriend at home who thinks she's beautiful. And who am I to shatter her ego?"

And, indeed, most girls who came to the search told us it was a great experience. Cindy, a Raleigh, South Carolina, entrant, said, "This has been the most fun I've ever had in my life, even if I don't win. It was a very positive thing. A creative thing. Like art. Like poetry." Sue Pagani, a 20-year-old Florida U coed, said simply, "I came here out of pride, to be able to say I've done it." Many women said they entered the Hunt only because they were prodded or dared to by friends or relatives. ("A lot of mothers brought in their daughters," said Bill Frantz: "so did a couple of fathers.") Kent (Washington) News-Journal reporter Susan Landgraf entered the Seattle search herself just to get a first-person account, but most other entrants had far less sophisticated reasons. One girl told Arsenault she had come because "I just broke up with my boyfriend and his last words to me were that I was a dog. I just came down here to prove to myself that he's wrong."

Another entrant, a 19-year-old Florida coed, told a University of Florida student newspaper, The Alligator, "My mother and grandmother would be angry if they knew I was here. Just terrible. But my dad would like it. He reads Playboy all the time."

Some entered out of the pure joy of self-expression, such as the girl interviewed in this excerpt from a Seattle Record-Chronicle article:

"Why do you want to pose for Playboy?" the reporter asks.

"Because I like to take my clothes off," she answers.

"That's good?"

"Of course. People are always nice to me when I take my clothes off. They're always friendly."

She smiles pleasantly. Her logic is simple and flawless. You can't argue with the truth.

But perhaps the best example of Zen Polaroid theater was an entrant who turned up among New York's 421 applicants (tops for any city) whom Hooker calmly refers to as The Snake Lady. She arrived at his suite with her own prop--a healthy boa constrictor that was wrapped around her body, gallantly holding her handbag in its tail. "She wasn't our Playmate," Hooker recalls, "but it was a very attractive snake."

A few came because they sought publicity or a boost for their careers in entertainment. Such an applicant was a Toronto stripper named Baby Honda who, according to Chan, weighed more than 400 pounds stripped to the tailpipes. "I said," Chan recalls, "'Since you're already a performer, perhaps you have a glossy you could give me.' She insisted I photograph her anyway." Chan, who is 5'5" and weighs 120 pounds in a soaked parka, inscrutably photographed her anyway. (Chan, by the way, swears that when he started working at Playboy, he was 6'2" and weighed 220. "I've been nearly 16 years with Playboy," he says ruefully, "and look at me now.")

The one reason for entering that more girls gave than any other was--you guessed it--the money. The second most popular reason seemed to be prestige. "I would be honored to be photographed by Playboy," many girls told us. Perhaps because their boyfriends or their fathers or brothers read Playboy, most of the entrants said they'd always looked upon Playboy as the standard setter for feminine beauty. Becky Lynch, 20, a quality-verifications clerk for State Farm Insurance, told The Kansas City Star she remembers Playboy as always being around her house during her childhood. "All I wanted to do," she said, "was be as pretty as the girls in the magazine." Not infrequently, applicants remained after their shootings to ask our photographers and staff questions about makeup, clothing and carriage.

"At times," said Berry, "I felt like a one-man finishing school."

Some girls were so aware of the kind of beauty Playboy looks for that they became literally petrified once they entered the shooting room. One girl in Raleigh was so distraught she broke out in hives; and in Kansas City, Jeff Cohen had one applicant who "was so nervous she couldn't stand up. I mean (concluded on page 336)Playmate Hunt(continued from page 208) literally couldn't stand up. She couldn't talk, either. I had to ask her to kneel and I shot her on her knees. Then she crawled back into the dressing room and locked the door."

In San Diego, a girl who walked into Morris and Miki Garcia's suite was also so scared she couldn't speak. But her beauty spoke for itself. "She was absolutely terrified," Morris remembers, "but she was also absolutely gorgeous. Our mouths dropped open." As it turned out, the panicked 18-year-old entrant, Amanda "Missy" Cleveland, became a finalist, as you can see on page 194.

There were those, however, who were not only relaxed but bold. Brassiest of the lot was a girl in San Jose who kept calling Garcia at various times of day. Her calls started with a laugh sound track playing in the background; when it stopped, she'd say, "But I'm really serious," then launch into a list of questions on how she should prepare for her moment before Morris' camera. ("Should I take a vitamin E bath?") She sent flowers for Garcia to her suite; then, on the day she was scheduled to be photographed, she appeared at the door bearing a 3' x 3' layer cake with two cherry-tipped confectionery breasts on top; it said, Happy Birthday Playboy.

She wasn't the only applicant who hoped to somehow influence our staff in her favor. In every city, at the end of each day's shooting, our photographers would almost always find something belonging to one of the girls. Invariably, the owner would return to retrieve the item and (not so incidentally) have another conversation with the photographer. Let it suffice to say that, although our photographers received innumerable invitations to dinner, drinks, etc., they easily managed to spurn the proffered extras; if only because, as Cohen put it, "we were just too damn tired."

Or they may have learned a lesson from Mike Berry about accepting dinner invitations in strange cities. Berry, despite his fatigue, accepted an invitation to dinner in Knoxville. One of his hosts, a lawyer, promised to bring Berry a taste of genuine white lightning. "He brought a glassful to this restaurant in the Hyatt House," Berry says. "Nice restaurant, pretty classy. So I take a sip of the stuff. Then, for what reason I don't know, probably the silliness that comes with fatigue, I decided to light my glass. To see if white lightning would light, I guess. A blue flame shoots up in the air two feet. I sit there, figuring it's going to die out. Well, it dies down, but then the glass shatters and there's this blue flame all over the table. I figure that's got to die out. It doesn't. This blue flame is now covering the tablecloth. The table starts to go up. The maitre de notices it about then, comes over with a large wet towel, calmly smothers it, then departs without a word. Like I said, a class restaurant."

•

When our photographers and the other members of our search teams finally returned home, they had met and photographed more than 3000 women (we also received more than 500 applications and photos through the mail). The applicants were housewives, secretaries, college students, government workers, businesswomen and, of course, aspiring models and actresses. About 100 of them were spotted by our photographers on sight as potential Playmates; of those, 50 were screened out by our Photography Department. The remaining 50 were asked to go to Chicago or Los Angeles studios for lengthier test shootings. For many of those 50, the expenses-paid trip and the opportunity to work with Playboy'S staff (as well as to experience our special kind of hospitality) was one of the most exciting events in their lives.

One entrant, Denise McConnell from Norman, Oklahoma, was so excited on being called back that she didn't realize that she was only being asked to do a test shooting. The Oklahoma Journal prematurely published a story stating that she was the winner of the search, then had to run another story explaining the misunderstanding.

Fortunately, Denise was among the finalists who were called in a third time for further shootings. She had told the Journal that "never in the history of Playboy has there been an Okie in the centerfold" and she wanted to be the first. Ironically, one made it. The winner of the search, Candy Loving, is also from Oklahoma. But we found Denise's charms so captivating that we just had to schedule her as a future Playmate, thus making it very likely that our centerfold will see its first two Okies in the same year.

In fact, our 16 finalists were all so special we wanted to let you see them so that you could second-guess us. Our very difficult final selection was made by Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner, with the close support of Photography Editor Gary Cole, who had conceived and directed the hunt with a generalship worthy of MacArthur. Also in attendance to influence the decision were such staff heavies as Arthur Kretchmer, Arthur Paul, Sheldon Wax and Tom Staebler--each shamelessly trying to buy votes and twist arms--all in the name of beauty.

If our winner isn't the one you would have chosen, take heart. Many of the finalists will be Playmates in the near future; so to see more of them, you won't have to wait another 25 years or until the next national Playmate Hunt, whichever comes first.

"This has been the most fun I've ever had, even if I don't win. It was a very positive thing."