Reincarnation

Olivia de berardinis can remember the first time she saw Lillian Müller on the pages of Playboy. "She was so beautiful," she recalls. "She really defined sexuality." That was 1976, the year in which Müller had been chosen Playboy's Playmate of the Year and had embarked on an ambitious acting and modeling career in Europe. De Berardinis was an artist—an erotic artist who was just beginning to build her reputation in a field dominated by men. She tore Müller's pictures from the magazine and pinned them to her studio walls for inspiration. Ten years later, the two women met. The occasion was a photo session at Playboy Studio West in Los Angeles, where the magazine was attempting to pull off an unusual homage to De Berardinis' art—which is now ranked with the work of Pat Nagel, Alberto Vargas and George Petty. The idea was to take several of her remarkable paintings and re-create them photographically. When the time came for the artist to meet the model, De Berardinis did a double take. By sheer coincidence, the woman Playboy had chosen for the layout was the very same Lillian Müller whose pictures had graced her studio.

For Müller, stepping inside Studio West was like a return home. After her Playmate of the Year promotional tour in 1976, she had returned to her native Norway. In Europe, she appeared on the covers of several magazines and starred in three films—Rosemary's Daughter, Doctor's Dilemma and Casanova & Company—before stunning her agents and friends with an impromptu early retirement. "I wanted to pursue a regular relationship and a normal life," she explains. She and her boyfriend moved to the Norwegian countryside. After a few years, it became apparent that the experiment wasn't working. "I wasn't made for a so-called regular life in Norway," she now admits. When her relationship foundered and her life in "a small town in a small country" became claustrophobic, she returned to the United States to resume her career.

Along the way, she made an important decision: to change her name. She had found that the surname Müller, combined with her sultry Norwegian accent, worked against her getting parts. "Everyone would take it for granted that I was German," she complains. "I was sick and tired of it, so I thought, Why not take my grandmother's (text concluded on page 146)Reincarnation(continued from page 120) name? I like to flatter her and make her happy." Müller's grandmother didn't have the most common of names, even for a French-Norwegian. In fact, Yuliis Ruvál (pronounced You-lease Roo-val) is probably one of the most unusual names to grace a marquee since Arnold Schwarzenegger's. While Müller is still Lillian's legal name, all her acting is now done as Yuliis Ruvál. "I know it's an unusual name, but I consider myself very unusual and it kind of fits the package."

The new name certainly hasn't been a hindrance. She estimates she has guested on more than 25 Tv shows since she returned to the U.S. three years ago; among them, Remington Steele, Crazy Like a Fox and Magnum, P.I., as well as such movies as King of the Mountain, The Devil and Max Devlin and Stewardess School.

Olivia De Berardinis has taken an equally circuitous route to success. She showed an aptitude for erotic art at the precocious age of nine, when she drew her own version of LeRoy Neiman's Femlin after seeing her father's copies of Playboy. Her parents, by her own description, were a somewhat eccentric, lusty, fun-loving couple who "got a big giggle out of sex." Around the house, risqué jokes were told with abandon. Not surprisingly, her father prized his daughter's Femlin sketch. It was almost preordained that De Berardinis go to art school; there she put aside eroticism and experimented with more conventional types of art. Eventually, however, she realized she would never be able to make a living in fine art and returned to drawing pinups. The experience taught her an important lesson: "You shouldn't fool with something that comes naturally."

At first, her work showed a hard-core eroticism appropriate only for some of the more explicit men's magazines. "That was fun to do for a while," she says. "The country was more liberated then." However, the more she painted, the softer and sexier her images became. "I realized that clothes and lingerie suggested so much more than explicit nudity did." Her popularity grew as her work became more mainstream. A series of posters done for a New York radio station, imagining the fantasies such musicians as Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart might have, were ripped out of the subways soon after they appeared—all 10,000 of them. She also did a movie poster for Bo Derek's Tarzan and started a successful line of greeting cards (for a catalog of Olivia's works, including the cards, a calendar and other reproductions, send two dollars to O Card Corp., P.O. Box 541, Midtown Station, New York, New York 10018).

Many enthusiasts consider her the quintessential pinup artist working today, and she's the first woman to earn such an accolade. But for De Berardinis, being a woman and an erotic artist is a logical combination. "Women are always looking at other women. It's very natural," she says. "I have trouble drawing a man in an erotic position." Still, when people meet her in her New York studio, they expect the artist to be as uninhibited as her art. "If I were like that, I wouldn't have time to paint," she laughs. "I guess some people think, others do."

Joel Beren, her husband and manager for the past seven years, agrees. "We're homebodies, leading a very quiet life. Olivia's a workaholic, seven days a week, 15 hours a day."

Lillian Müller doesn't travel on the fast track, either. "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do any drugs," she reports. "I go to my little healthy places to eat, because I'm a vegetarian, and I don't go to parties or premieres. You don't actually get work by hanging out—you get it by doing a good job."

Right now, Müller is concentrating on movie roles. "I'm a bit tired of television," she says. "It's not creative enough." She's an avid moviegoer—her list of favorite directors and stars reads like the Beverly Hills telephone book—and she continues to take acting and singing lessons. Her appearance in Playboy is part of her specific career planning. "It's not enough for me to marry a rich man and have a great social life, with a Rolls-Royce and a mansion," she says. "I have to make the most of my talent. I want some quality in my life, and I think I can combine being a 'sex symbol' with being a serious actress. Playboy fits in because this is a very classy layout, like a piece of art. And it was a privilege to work with Olivia."

As De Berardinis watched this layout take shape, she was surprised. "I felt so strange," she explains. "I deal so much in fantasy, making things curve the way I want them to. Suddenly, I was watching my two-dimensional fantasies come to life. It was amazing and sort of eerie."

"Yuliis Ruvál is probably one of the most unusual names to grace a marquee since Schwarzenegger's."

Costume Adaptation by Lesley Levin