Girls of Hawaii

When, Just a Little Over 200 years ago, the British sea captain James Cook arrived at the tropical archipelago we now call the Hawaiian Islands (Cook himself named them the Sandwich Islands in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich), he was astonished at the hospitality of the natives--particularly the females. "No women I ever met were less reserved," he wrote, noting their eagerness to "make a surrender of their persons." The Congregational missionaries from New England who followed him in the 1820s made note of the same-tendency and were particularly shocked at the expanses of bare skin that confronted them. They soon enveloped Hawaii's buxom wahines in baggy Mother Hubbard dresses (predecessors of today's colorful and casual muumuus). Ah, for the good old days. The tourist landing at bustling Honolulu International Airport today is unlikely to be surrounded by females (text concluded on page 250)Girls of Hawaii(continued from page 153) clamoring to "surrender their persons," nor is everybody running around Maui unclothed. But much of the islands' tradition of hospitality remains--as does their inhabitants' lack of reticence about their bodies. Maybe the weather has something to do with it, but Playboy staffers, scouting for this feature, found that most girls of Hawaii have a positive attitude toward their bodies.

"To many of these girls, nudity is just no big thing," observed Associate Photography Editor Jeff Cohen, who coordinated the project.

An idea of Hawaiian ladies' responsiveness may be gathered from the fact that when Honolulu radio station Korl conducted a Playboy Wahine Search for applicants interested in appearing in the magazine, more than 350 young women submitted photos of themselves. By comparison, when two years ago the Great Playmate Hunt went to New York City--which has a population 23 times greater than that of Honolulu--in search of a 25th-anniversary Playmate, 421 applications were received. And that contest, you'll remember, carried the tantalizing prospect of a $25,000 bonus!

The hospitality noted by the aforementioned Caption Cook--never mind that he was assassinated by those same hospitable Hawaiians; that was due to a misunderstanding over his position in the pantheon of gods--is also responsible for the most noteworthy feature of Hawaiian womanhood, its strikingly beautiful mixture of racial heritages. Hawaiian. European. Japanese, Tahitian, Chinese, Korean--all strains have blended over the years in the easy, relatively nonprejudicial atmosphere of the islands. In our own less enlightened recent past, that racial mixing was largely responsible for delays in admitting Hawaii to statehood; Southern legislators thought it set a bad example, and statehood bills failed in Congress dozens of times. The 50th state finally flew the American flag on July 4, 1960.

Since then, more and more haoles--a term denoting foreigners, now usually taken to mean whites--have settled in Hawaii, so that among the dark-haired, dark-eyed natives we find a generous smattering of lighter-skinned mainlanders, some of whom themselves now feel like kamaaina, or old-times. Take Holliday Ozan: "My dad and I arrived in Hawaii in 1962," she told us, "when I was eight years old. He met and married a local lady of Japanese descent, and we decided to stay in Hawaii. Back then, I was the only white person I knew. Life was very simple, very primitive."

California-born Nicole Ericson first visited Hawaii in 1970 with her father, actor John Ericson, who was on tour. Today she actually commutes from Los Angeles to Oahu. An actress herself, she has appeared in Hawaii Five-O and Eight Is Enough, as well as in live theater.

In contrast, Shelly Silva, another Hawaiian girl we interviewed, can trace her ancestry back on one side to a shipload of early missionaries and on the other to a great-grandfather who "just happened to get off the ship here while sailing around the world in search of employment; he married a local girl."

Audria Wilson's paternal great-grandfather was born into slavery in the American South; her maternal grandfather, Fred B. Sutter, was a descendant of California pioneer John Augustus Sutter.

"I give up trying to break my ancestry into percentages," she says, "but I'm black, Choctaw, Blackfoot, English, French, Cherokee, German, Swiss, Irish and Dutch."

Clarissa Matthews' parents and grand parents were all born in the islands; they're a mixture of Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish and Korean blood. Clarissa's father is now director of a school for disadvantaged children on the Big Island.

Elvina Taurua comes from the island of Moorea, sister island of Tahiti; youngest of 15 children of Tahitian-English-German parents, she was taken to Hawaii at the age of seven to be educated by an American couple who later adopted her. A professional Polynesian dancer, she speaks three languages: Tahitian, French and English.

To Pattie McKinley, a hapa haole (half-Caucasian) resident of Honolulu, growing up in Hawaii was wonderful.

"There's so much to do outdoors all year round; I was always brown, out at the beach, fishing, climbing mango trees and eating the fruit right off the branch. There's a real family feeling in Hawaii, too. Everyone helps out; grandparents, parents and children live under the same roof in many cases, like mine. I basically grew up in an Oriental family, spoke pidgin among friends and family and good English in school and on the job. Being from Hawaii is like weaving a multicolored tapestry."

Mahalo nui (many thanks), Pattie. That celebrated literary admirer of the islands, James Michener, couldn't have put it better.

"'To many of these girls, nudity is no big thing,' observed Associate Photography Editor Jeff Cohen."