What Do You Say to a Naked Cheer Leader? Goodbye!

"We Were a group of girls who really gave our all for the team. You'd think no problem would be so big that the management couldn't sit down and talk it out. But we ran into a wall of silence. We felt like we were waging a war."

What Jill Fleming, ex–San Diego Chargette, was talking about wasn't so much a war as a shoot-out. And her part-time employers, the National Football League's Chargers, fired the first salvo last September when they dismissed the entire 20-member troupe of Chargette cheerleaders because they learned that one girl had posed nude for the lavish 12-page December Playboy pictorial in which we uncovered the cheerleaders of pro football. Even before that issue exploded on the newsstands, five more N.F.L. teams had gone for leather and nearly 50 of America's most visible female football fans had bitten the dust. They died, so to speak, with their boots on ... and admittedly little else.

We foresaw that our pictorial (Pro Football's Main Attractions) would arouse controversy when we began putting it together last summer. A few N.F.L. teams were immediately resistant to the idea of their cheerleaders' appearing in Playboy, and some threatened to fire those girls who cooperated with us. On the other hand, the cheerleaders who did pose for us felt they were well within their rights to do so on their own time. After all, the clubs generally paid them $15 or less per game for a "job" that—including rehearsals—demanded anywhere from four to eight hours a week.

Of course, the N.F.L. teams didn't see it that way. Long before the December issue was out, we were getting calls from clubs demanding to know just which women had posed—and what, if anything, they were wearing. The tone of most calls was close to frantic. Although we refused to give out names, some of them became known, and the dismissals began.

Not only was the San Diego Chargers' cheering squad disbanded but Baltimore Colts cheerleader Andrea Mann was cashiered, Honey Bear Jackie Rohrs lost her job with the Chicago Bears, New England Patriots cheerleader Karen Ita Siders was bounced (although the Patriots claimed she had been dismissed earlier) and the already problem-plagued 24-member Angels cheering troupe of the New Orleans Saints was banished from the Superdome. Denver Broncos cheerleader LouAnn Ridenoure didn't even bother reporting for work with the Pony Express after management learned she had posed partly nude.

Meanwhile, the press was having a wonderful time with the story, a fact that so unnerved the N.F.L. owners that when they met with commissioner Pete Rozelle in Chicago, they hammered out a statement on what had come to be known as the Great American Cheerleader Controversy.

The owners—particularly the ones who had fired cheerleaders—had taken a beating in the newspapers. While not all of the dozens of editorials and columns written about the controversy lauded the cheerleaders, almost every one chided the N.F.L. owners for their sudden fit of morality, pointing out that before Playboy entered the picture, clubs had been fiercely competing to outfit the most, ah, photogenic cheerleading squads.

Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith summed up the over-all press view of the firings this way: "The most wonderful aspect of all this is the solemn hypocrisy that the girls were hired in the first place to lead cheers or inspire the team. They were hired to entertain us male fans on television, and nothing else."

Ironically, before the dust had died down, the girls weren't even entertaining us fans on television. Interviewed by The Washington Star on Thanksgiving Day, ABC's Monday Night Football director Chet Forte piously vowed he wouldn't put any more scantily clad N.F.L. cheerleaders oncamera. That pronouncement caused syndicated columnist Carl T. Rowan to bestow upon Forte the title Turkey of the Year, pointing out: "If the ABC brass had not figured out how to exploit televised sex, the network would have gone out of business years ago. There isn't a cheerleader in 26 N.F.L. cities who parades the stadium showing more cleavage, or more bosoms hugged by wet clothing, than do ABC's Charlie's Angels."

But it wasn't just the press who found the cheerleader issue worthy of thousands of words. The fans also had much to say about the situation. It seemed that once the story broke, everyone who'd ever watched a pro-football game had an opinion: Housewives called talk shows to say they had never liked their husbands' ogling the cheerleaders, anyway; feminists said the firings added one sexist insult to another; and, of course, those fans who like their half times spicy expressed outrage.

Some people saw even deeper meaning to what happened, "Playboy defiled the temple," said Princeton University sociologist Bruce Finnie when we asked his opinion of the N.F.L.'s response. Football, said Finnie, is a veritable religion.

"Sure. Why do we play it on Sunday? Why do we sing the national anthem before it? Why do we treat it with such reverence? Why is it getting immunity from laws that nothing else gets? Why are Pete Rozelle and other high priests interviewed as though their words were Holy Writ?"

Dr. Finnie, who has taught a course in Sport and Society at Princeton, said many people feel that a basic purity, a basic set of noble motives, was threatened when the cheerleaders-cum–temple virgins were shown as real women with a direct—not coy—sexual appeal.

Whatever the truth of Finnie's hypothesis, the N.F.L. owners, in their meeting with Rozelle, decreed that each club would be responsible for the dress code and conduct of its cheerleaders. Some clubs are investigating the legality of requiring cheerleaders to sign a contract forbidding nude modeling for magazines. Previously, the cheerleaders' contracts required only that they remain covered before the television cameras, a rule that had been broken—to the delight of male viewers—several times by wellendowed young women popping out of their skimpy outfits.

As ultimate evidence that pro football, like Charles Colson, had been born again without lust in its heart, the Washington Redskins restitched the costumes of the Redskinettes to cover their navels and other distracting bodily regions.

•

But while the N.F.L. was busy shoring up its public image and a no-longer-amused America turned to more pressing issues, the lives of the fired women had been irrevocably changed. For some, the publicity was a blessing in disguise. Others wished they had never been pro cheerleaders in the first place, feeling betrayed by the football clubs to which they had once devoted so much of their time. The name of Elizabeth Caleca, the Chargette who provoked the Chargers to disband their cheerleading squad, leaped into the headlines; her phone rang off the hook for nearly two weeks. "At first," she says, "there were news-papers radio reporters, television people. After that, the obscene phone calls started."

Some of the latter callers referred indelicately to Liz's lifestyle. A nudist for three years, she had been voted Miss Nude California 1977, a fact that, oddly enough, didn't seem to bother the Chargers until she was photographed—not surprisingly, in the nude—for Playboy.

Since the purge, Liz has moved to Los Angeles in search of a career in films. So far, she's landed appearances on several television talk shows, including Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show, as well as a role in her first film, a United American Pictures production called Skin Deep, which she expects will have an R rating. According to Liz, the plot is roughly based on her life. "It's a love story set in an environment of social nudity. Cheerleader meets surfer, they explore the meaning of life."

Liz says that although her father wasn't (text concluded on page 172) Naked Cheerleader (conntinued from page 148) enthusiasticabout her posing for Playboy, her parents have supported her throughout her arduous transition from stadium side lines to silver screen. She particularly credits her mother with being "tremendously understanding."

"You gotta admit they're a hard team to be a fan for," says Jill Fleming. Jill, who was one of five Chargettes Playboy photographed, didn't appear in the pictorial, but nonetheless suffered through several days of people's asking if she was one of the "nasty five." "It would have been nicer and easier if this hadn't happened," she says, "but no one can ever make me ashamed."

Lynita Shilling, one of the Chargettes who did appear nude in the December pictorial, says that when she posed for Playboy "I had no idea it would turn out like this. But I'll tell you one thing. I wasn't sure Playboy was a class magazine before this happened, but from my first shooting through everything that's happened since, I'm convinced it's the best, most beautiful magazine around."

Shilling, Andrea Mann, Jacquelyn Rohrs, Karen Ita Siders and Bunny Hover (whose Playboy appearance may have contributed to the disbanding of the New Orleans Angels) were popular guests on radio and television talk shows across the country when the controversy peaked. As a result, all five girls have probably received more media exposure than they ever would have in the boom-boom line. For Shilling, it has been a mixed blessing ("My fiancé has been kind of negative about the whole thing," she says). Rohrs and Hover believe the exposure has boosted their careers. But for Andrea Mann, the hurt of her dismissal by the Baltimore Colts lingers.

"I got a call from management, saying, 'We don't want your kind of girl,' " she says. "They told me sex has nothing to do with Colt cheerleaders, that the cheerleaders have a wholesome image—and that anyone who'd pose for Playboy wasn't wholesome."

That treatment was a tremendous disappointment to Andrea, a postal worker and a lifelong Colt fan. "I hadn't sneaked around behind the team's back," she says. "I had been told I could pose for Playboy. But- afterward, the Colts said they didn't realize the pictorial would involve nudity. Do you believe that?"

Jackie Rohrs, who markets her own line of cosmetics (Jacquelyn K Creations), was delighted to find that her dismissal and the subsequent publicity gave an unexpected boost to her business.

"I was worried about the effect all this might have on my company," she says, "since all my clients knew me as a very straight lady in a suit with a briefcase.

"But when I came back from a short trip after the December issue came out, my answering service had messages from 33 people across the country inquiring about my products. My business partner was going crazy."

Rohrs—who has a wonderful sense of humor about her own ambition ("Hey, listen," she says, "I've come a long way: I was Miss Garbage Disposal Bag at a trade show a couple of years ago")—admits there have been a few sad moments. "My eight-year-old daughter, Machaelie Ann, cried when I was fired. She was like a mascot at our practices. I had made her a little Honey Cub outfit with the number eight on the back. But she held up under the pressure of the publicity pretty well. At school, a little boy teased her with, 'I saw your mommy in Playboy nude,' and my daughter responded, 'Well, your mommy wasn't asked to be in Playboy.'"

The cheerleader controversy has also been good, more or less, for former New England Patriots cheerleader Karen Ita Siders (who used only her middle name in the December pictorial). "My parents took it kind of negatively, "she says. "I was told to leave the house, and they wouldn't talk to me for three weeks. On the other hand, the experience has given me a lot of confidence and the courage to be myself, to follow my own convictions."

Karen, 20, a make-up artist for a Boston modeling agency, has been a regular model for a well-known Boston artist and sculptor. "'I've gotten a lot of opportunities from this fiasco," she says. "I've posed for Playboy again [for which we're sure the viewers of these pages are most grateful], I've done the Evening Magazine [a local talk show] and a couple of other programs." Shortly after the December issue appeared, a local radio station had a banquet for her (she was driven to the ceremony in a limousine), at which her fans let her know they didn't think she had been naughty.

Ex-Angel Bunny Hover hasn't had much time to worry about her disaffiliation with the Saints. For one thing, she's a full-time legal secretary. For another, she's a serious dance student who's got, as the song says, "offers comin' over the phone." Bunny (whom you may remember as the card girl for the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks title match last fall) received a request for her cheerleading services from a table-tennis team in Iceland, and a New Orleans radio station has asked her to be its "traffic Angel in the sky"—a rush-hour helicopter traffic-flow reporter.

In addition, Bunny has been busy with her fellow ex-Angels, who have been trying to find work as a troupe elsewhere. "It's been hard to keep the group together," she says. "We've taken our show into a few local discos, but it's hard to find an employer for a 24-girl dance troupe."

Maybe what we need is another Radio City Music Hall.

"'You gotta admit they're a hard team to be a fan for,' says ex-Chargette Jill Fleming,"