Sex Stars of 1984

Arms outstretched, she spread her legs wide. He stood there, chest heaving. The girl grasped the short, firm pole caringly, longingly, then shared it with the other girl. Buttocks taut, hewrithed, twisting from side to side, eager to cram every possible excitement into the moments that would never be the same again....

Every four years, it's good to have this kind of stuff back on television, even if only for a couple of weeks during the Olympics. True, some people really do care whether or not (text continued on page 210) one fellow gets his bicycle out in front of another's for a hundredth of a second. But there are equally good reasons for watching, and, for millions who will admit it and millions more who won't, the Olympic participants were truly the Sex Stars of 1984. You simply can't put that many perfect male and female bodies in skimpy garments and have it otherwise. The flame burns eternal.

The Olympics arrived just in time, fortunately, for it was getting a wee bit confusing elsewhere. Almost impossible to spell and equally hard to understand, androgyny took over the middle ground in the war between the sexes, with Boy George and Michael Jackson at one end and Grace Jones and Anne Carlisle at the other. Happily, though, there was a host of hetero holdouts, tenaciously exemplified by the likes of Tom Selleck, who protected himself with a lot of casual dating before showing serious interest in British actress Jillie Mack, and Kathleen Turner, who confessed (shortly before walking down the aisle with New York real-estate developer Jay Weiss) that she had a tendency to fall in and out of love with her leading men. Nothing, however, has been reported from the set of Crimes of Passion, in which Turner plays a kinky cruiser opposite Anthony Perkins.

Frankly, we have been waiting several years for Jackson to mature into full Sex Stardom, but the young man just seems to show no interest in growing up. And as loose as they are, we do have our standards, which include some reservations about a Sex Star who doesn't protest when people say he looks like Diana Ross's twin sister. Young master Jackson, however, must be paid homage after a phenomenal year of pleasing millions. Whatever he's putting out, the young ladies--and gentlemen--love it. Grace Jones thinks the far-out parents from the Sixties may simply have spawned even more adventuresome kids for the Eighties. Jones herself certainly looked adventuresome while filming Conan the Destroyer, landing several fellow cast members in the hospital with minor injuries from her enthusiastic interpretation of an Amazon warrior. She even made her brawny co-star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, nervous. "She really hits hard," he lamented.

Jackson himself remains quietly religious, with no overt romantic interests. Boy George has conceded, "I just do not have a heavy sex life," while the most outrageous cross dresser of them all, the megaplump Divine, claims he doesn't have much time for men or women. "I'd rather go shopping," he insists.

Is this sort of thing catching? It's hard to say, but we were talking with one of Hollywood's lovelies the other day and she was revealing what her private love life had become. It seems that on an average evening, she and her handsome, charming boyfriend go out to dinner before returning home for a bit of romancing. Just as she's getting turned on, however, he excuses himself and leaves the room, returning in a wig, nightgown, high heels and stockings. A modern girl, our friend readily accepts all this but confesses to some confusion about who is doing what in the bedroom--or, at least, who thinks who's doing what.

Alas, when we related all this to another starlet the very next night, she didn't seem surprised at all. One of her gentlemen callers, it seems, likes to bring his dress over and--after she's done his hair and makeup--suck her toes.

Sarah Douglas of Falcon Crest acknowledged that she had a bit of a problem explaining her transvestite friends to her mother. "I talked to my mom on the phone and I told her Kevin and Katy were there. 'Oh, they're a nice couple, are they?' said Mom. I said, 'Oh, it's the same person, Kevin by day, Katy by night. But he's getting it lopped off next week.'"

Onscreen, the sex changes that started a couple of years back continued, causing their own confusions among performers. Playing a young man in Yentl, for example, Barbra Streisand was somewhat hesitant about having to plant a big kiss on Amy Irving. But, as Irving related later, it wasn't so bad. "It's like kissing an arm," Barbra told Amy, which may have surprised Steven Spielberg, Irving's former finance and still-frequent companion.

Psychiatrists say this is all just an adjustment to sexual role playing and probably harmless enough if not overdone. For the sake of the straight-thinking, however, it was still heartening to note that Jackson's popularity was challenged by Prince, who bears a resemblance to Michael but has a mustache, a motorcycle and more all-round masculinity to go with them, especially when in passionate pursuit of lovely Apollonia Kotero in Purple Rain.

Ah, Apollonia. What a name. What a face. What a body. Her film debut in that picture made an impression to rival Bo Derek's a few years back in "10". "Before the night is through, you will see my point of view." Prince said; but the boys in the audience had caught on long before that.

Speaking of Bo (and aren't we always?), Hollywood had been waiting to see how the public would react to her latest, Bolero, at first rumored to be too sexy to release without an X rating. But then the film's financiers disclosed that they weren't bothered by the fact that the sex might be pornographic; they worried that it was just plain stupid, blaming hubby/director John Derek for overindulgence in photographing Bo's bod. So far, however, that's the kind of indulgence audiences seem to think cannot be overed. Certainly, an appearance by Bo in July's Playboy wasn't ignored.

Even Walt Disney's studios matured (with a new, mature name, Touchstone Films) and decided to flesh out those cite, nippleless little mermaids that used to grace the cartoons. Chosen for the chore, fortunately, was gorgeous Daryl Hannah, who had had some previous experience with nudity in Reckless and Summer Lovers. Still, Daryl didn't doff readily, pasting Band-Aids over her nipples and packing make-up over that.

Hannah's triumph in Splash was no comfort for Diane Lane, who had competed with Daryl for leads in that picture and in Streets of Fire, losing one but winning the other. "Great! She'll show her chest and I'll sing," Lane commented somewhat superciliously about the competitive split. As it turned out, not only did Fire fizzle but Lane's singing was dubbed by Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood, among others.

Whatever the trend of the moment, the public itself simply refuses to become too jaded. Nudity remains sexy, as Playboy has proved repeatedly. Recent layouts of the likes of Joan Collins, Kim Basinger, Terry Moore, Mariel Hemingway, Nastassja Kinski and Tanya Roberts helped them tap into new levels of popularity never achieved with excessive modesty.

For the entire year, in fact, there was little to rival the revelation that Miss America, Vanessa Williams, had posed nude before winning the title. Although Playboy passed up a chance to print the sexplicit pictures, we were far from surprised at the crowds lined up for a look when they did appear elsewhere. The hubbub forced Vanessa to give up her crown, but it may have assured her of a showbiz career.

Even near nudity can be troublesome, as Alice Zook discovered out there in Bartonville, Illinois. A gym teacher for 20 years, poor Alice lost her job at the Limestone Community High School for showing her girls' phys-ed classes a video tape of exercises as performed by the male strippers at Chippendales, one of those nighteries that flourish by teasing women-folk.

Indeed, the females are still insisting on seeing their fair share of skin, even though, for a change, Richard Gere did not strip in a movie this year. But while touring Japan, Rick Springfield did respond dramatically to a female reporter's query as to whether or not he wore underwear: He dropped his trousers at the press conference. (Less dramatically, the answer was, he did.) And getting to the bottom of things, the fan mags discovered that John Travolta also wears undies, but inside out, so the tags don't scratch.

Panties, however, remain preferred for truly suggestive attire, as newcomer Kelly LeBrock proves wonderfully in The Woman in Red. Borrowing from the famed Marilyn Monroe photo, LeBrock lets the air from a strategically placed vent in a garage blow her skirt high above her head and dances delightfully, going back for an encore.

And for her big film debut in Scarface,Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio teases audiences in a flimsy robe that seems sure to (concluded on page 214) Sex Stories (continued from page 210) fall open any moment as she oozes obscenities at big brother Al Pacino in one of the year's more unusual scenes.

On television, of course, everything is suggestion, and even too much of that is forbidden. Dealing with incest in Something About Amelia. ABC laid down firm rules about how the father, Ted Danson, should behave around the daughter, Roxana Zal: Certainly, the network said, they should never be shown in bed together.

TV censors certainly have to think clearly, given the medium's continuing determination to sell sex in one form or another. Or, as former ABC executive Lou Rudolph put it (reinforcing something said here earlier). "You can never underestimate the horniness of the American public."

This year, TV's emphasis was on how others sell sex, sending so many aspiring actresses into the streets to talk with hookers that the Johns couldn't get close to the curb. Their research (and the networks' interest) may have been inspired by the box-office success of Angel, whose star. Donna Wilkes, spent hours on the street, talking with the girls about picking up tricks to the trade. Returning to the small screen for the first time in three years, Farrah Fawcett had a ratings hit as a madam in The Red Light Sting. Others who played prostitutes included Loni Anderson in My Mother's Secret Life.Veronica Hamel in Sessions.Phoebe Cates in Lace and Jennifer Jason-Leigh and Ann Jillian in Girls of the White Orchid. Even demure Debby Boone joined Barbara Carrera and Kim Cattrall in Sins of the Past. (Don't you just love those titles?)

Naturally enough, the networks had another rule for all these shows: Hooking does not bring happiness. The ladies involved had to either repent and get out or suffer terrible consequences.

Either way, many women viewers protested that prostitution is not an ideal occupation, and the clamor continued for more shows about working girls of a different sort. This generated television's idea of a socially redeeming response, e.g., the female detectives in Cagney & Lacey (Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless), Partners in Crime (Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter) and such crime-busting stepsisters as police psychiatrist Lindsay Wagner in Jessie. Other TV cops were real cuties, like luscious Heather Locklear on T.J. Hooker. Although willing to try a padded bra, Heather drew the line at padded panties and bikinis, saying she's not wild about scenes designed "strictly to show off what's under the uniform." Fortunately, she didn't win all her battles.

Although their pique is often understandable, young actresses do have a way of quickly forgetting why they were hired for a show in the first place. Over on the decidedly male A-Team, pretty Melinda Culea kept demanding more important duties and soon found herself replaced (the so-called Suzanne Somers solution to a producer's problem). Luckily, Heather Thomas understands her station on The Fall Guy better and has been content to remain as Lee Majors' side-kick. "I'm lucky to be working," said she wisely.

Offscreen, of course, the women were holding their own in all sorts of relationships, none of them establishing a trend but all seeming to share a fundamental wariness of their mates.

Perhaps Morgan Fairchild summed it up best, explaining why she and Craig Denault don't live together after divorces for each. "You have to give up too much freedom," said she. "You put up with a man's bad moods, wash his socks, clean up his dinner plates--hell, if I loved someone that much, I'd marry him."

And there may be additional significance in the fact that sexy Maria Conchita Alonso, who was happy to share a bathtub with Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, papered with pictures of herself on magazine covers. "I've always wanted to be the center of attention," she explains.

Or the balance Julie (Educating Rita) Walters finds in her small flat in London: "I have phases of being promiscuous and phases of being celibate. When I'm not working, I'm more interested in sex and blokes."

Such candor, of course, is not always commonplace among the foreign ladies, who have a flairfor the mysterious. After steadfastly refusing to identify the father during her pregnancy, Nastassja Kinski acknowledged after the birth of a boy that Dad was Ibrahim Moussa. (They made it legal a few weeks later.) One of the suspected fathers had been old beau RomanPolanski, who keeps turning up in the lives of many lovelies. Polanski also acted a small part in the directorial debut of beautiful Arielle Dombasle, raising questions about their relationship, but Arielle wasn't talking.

British rock star Adam Ant has a tattoo on his upper arm with a heart inscribed Pure Sex. And somewhere on the same arm was draped Jamie Lee Curtis, who got antsy for him after her breakup with longtime financé Michael Riva.

More romantically, Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay followed through on their commercially based romance in Risky Business by deciding to live together, with Tom apparently having re-evaluated his initial decision that their love scenes in the movie "weren't all that much."

Another screen couple, Michael Paré and Nancy Allen, also followed their romance in The Philadelphia Experiment with one in real life, though Paré at the time had the embarrassment of a wife, who filed for divorce. And, after posturing as one of the industry's more arrogant newcomers, Paré suffered the additional embarrassment of having Philadelphia prove to be as big a flop as his first two pictures, Eddie and the Cruisers and Streets of Fire.

Although noting "I'm not very promiscuous," Daryl Hannah shared a house Platonically with one man, writer David Stenn, while continuing her long affair with rocker Jackson Browne while he was divorcing his second wife, Lynne Sweeney.

For others, marriage was as durable as their careers. Robert Redford celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary and the success of another picture, The Natural, while James Brolin chalked up an 18th year of wedded bliss and his comeback in a new TV series, Hotel.

Leave it to Linda Ronstadt, though, to come up with one of the year's most interesting romances, taking up with producer-director George Lucas after he split from his wife, film editor Marcia Lucas. After California governor Jerry Brown, writer Pete Hamill and songwriter J. D. Souther, Ronstadt found in Lucas another reclusive personality to match her own. And with multimillions coming in from nearly a score of hot-selling records, Linda need not fear that George would think she just loved him for his Star Wars millions (not to mention a few more of his nickels from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

Speaking of those megahits, they all have something in common besides Lucas: Harrison Ford. And if Linda had been looking for a hermit, he would not have been a bad choice. Ford has been so successful in avoiding publicity--especially about his private life--that in a recent national poll, only one out of five people knew who he was. He was left out of this layout, in fact, because there just weren't suitable photos available.

Ford's zealous passion for privacy, unfortunately, is fraught with danger, mainly because it leaves the field open for people like us to speculate. Maybe he's secretly androgynous. Maybe he once posed nude or, even worse, appeared partially clothed on Alice Zook's video tape out there in Bartonville.

If so, it's certainly easy to understand why the high school--gym girls might have been crushed when the tape was seized by their elders. But they probably got over it soon enough. After all, they still had the Olympics to look forward to.

"Leave it to Linda Ronstadt to come up with one of the year's most interesting romances, with George Lucas"