Sex Stars of 1988

New agers have a theory: There's no such thing as time, at least not the way the rest of us see it. Therefore, all the Sex Stars of 1988 are actually living decades ago--and today, too. Well, why not? Once you're accustomed to getting the best tables, it's probably no big trick to pick and choose among time warps, and heaven knows, the Eighties have had their drawbacks. There is something suspiciously like the Forties and Fifties in the way so many celebrities are finding themselves caught between marriage and divorce. One day, they may attempt a wholesome romance, slipping into something more comfortable but less fun; the next, they're sleeping (text continued on page 198) Sex Stars (contiuned from page 181) around into something more fun but rather less comfortable. Is that Dick and Liz over there, or Sly and Gitte? Did you say that singer who's on the balcony with Another Woman was the Fifties' Frank Sinatra or the Eighties' Bruce Springsteen, out for a romp with backup singer Patti Scialfa--to the dismay of his 1985 bride, Julianne Phillips, who filed for divorce? Has Clark Gable come back as Kevin Costner? If gossip died with Hedda, Louella and Walter, who are Oprah, Phil and Geraldo?

There's definitely something otherworldly about the engagement, off and on, of Brigitte Nielsen and N.Y. Jets defensive end Mark Gastineau. The pair met at the Super Bowl, fell madly in lust and broke up--but not before they'd had each other's names tattooed on their rear ends. Possibly realizing that this could limit their future love lives, they renewed the engagement pending Gastineau's divorce from his model wife, Lisa, who graciously commented, "They're cut from the same mold, both publicity conscious. I can't see him with any person who has a past--and, God, she has a past!"

Gitte's past, of course, includes several Playboy appearances, an ex-husband and a child in her native Denmark and a reported $6,000,000 settlement in her divorce last year from hubby number two, Sylvester Stallone. Not to be outdone in graciousness by Mrs. Gastineau, Stallone's mother, Jackie, observed, "Gitte is the poorest example of a female I've ever known."

Sly consoled himself for a while with Alana Hamilton Stewart, ex of George Hamilton and Rod Stewart, then took up with socialite Cornelia Guest. Lying under a tank during the shooting oiRambo III, Stallone told how he psychs himself up for one more action shot: "I'm saying, 'Come on, Sly, one more time.... That'll be the one. Hang on.'" Presumably, he says much the same thing about his love life.

Nielsen--who ended up with a tasteful engagement ring with diamonds in the shape of a nine to remind her of Mark's jersey number, 99--wasn't the only beauty to fall for a jock. Not since Joe DiMaggio wed Marilyn Monroe have so many celebrity athletes been romancing actresses, with similarly mixed success. Spirited Robin Givens, star of ABC's Head of the Class and frequent companion to such stars as Eddie Murphy, wed heavyweight champ Mike Tyson and the two of them almost went down for the count in the tabloids. Their courtship and marriage were marred by tales of alleged fights with each other, and with family and business associates, culminating in the crash of his luxury car. Givens denied that they'd been fighting at the time of the wreck but concedes that Tyson was so disgusted that he gave the $180,000 auto to the police. Her wifely explanation: "It was just a man going, 'Ugh! Forget it!' He didn't want to drive the car, you know, his Bentley, with a dent in it."

Tyson's expensive sensitivities may have come from his business association with handsome zillionaire developer Donald Trump, who owns part of the boxer and a lot of everything else with his own beautiful blonde wife, Ivana, herself a former champion skier on the Czech Olympic team. Dubbed "Ivana-dis, Ivana-dat" by one New York columnist, the acquisitive Mrs. Trump has three houses and her own $2,000,000 helicopter, which she uses regularly to commute to Atlantic City to oversee some of her husband's many casino operations. Also a former model, the leggy Ivana seems to have an enviably perfect life--and knows it.

"People get upset if you're really happy. And I think it's upsetting to people that Donald and I have it all: We're young, we're healthy, we love our work and we have a good marriage and children on top of that! People just can't stand that."

Happy, too, was Wayne Gretzky, eight times the National Hockey League's most valuable player with the Edmonton Oilers in his native Canada, who married lovely Hollywood actress Janet Jones and naturally wanted to spend more time with her and their impending offspring. So Gretzky--like Gastineau, a number 99--arranged to have himself traded to the L.A. Kings in a multimillion-dollar deal described by the sports press as a "Kings' ransom."

Not so happy, however, was Boston Red Sox' four-time American League batting champion Wade Boggs. He got a curve ball in court from California mortgage broker Margo Adams, who said that Boggs--married and the father of two--had broken a verbal agreement to pay her expenses to accompany him on road trips during a four-year love affair. Boggs denied Adams' financial claims but acknowledged her companionship on the road and said he had apologized to his wife. Adams added that she is hoping for a book deal.

No doubt about it, women have a thing for ballplayers. Susan Sarandon showed that in the sleeper hit Bull Durham, playing a very sexy woman who picks one heavy hitter at a time. ("I am, within the framework of a baseball season, monogamous," she explains in the film.)

Sarandon has always had a fine sense of proportion. Back in 1981, after an appearance in Playboy's Grapevine feature, she observed, "Why not be the celebrity breasts? It's fabulous. There are so many great breasts around; it's nice to break through the ranks."

Her Bull Durham co-star Kevin Costner, who also reads Playboy, said he was a bit uneasy about his own body in the film's sexy love scenes. "I'm not the kind of guy who hangs out at a gym. You don't find me lifting weights. I know now why women get intimidated looking at Playboy, saying, 'This is what a woman is supposed to look like,' because 85 percent of us walking around don't have what you would call extreme definition."

Speaking of extremes, Jamie Lee Curtis has now decided she doesn't want to show her body anymore after her sexually sizzling role in A Fish Called Wanda. "When I was making horror films, the same body was there all the time. But it wasn't until I did the Dorothy Stratten TV film [Death of a Centerfold] that people thought, Holy shit, look at her body. Let's exploit that. Now, after Wanda, it's going to get a lot harder to be taken seriously as an actress. It's like, 'Oh, God, here we go again,' with the scripts for sexually forthright women."

Curtis refused a nude scene in her next film, Blue Steel, commenting, "The character I play in the film has nothing to do with my body. Because my body is good, it has become a cause célèbre, and now it would take away from any work I do. I showed my body for the right reasons at the right times and I'm not going to do it again." Not even if we beg?

Even Michelle Pfeiffer, gorgeous star of The Witches of Eastwick and Married to the Mob, has been known to worry about her beauty. "I don't know that I've ever felt that I was extraordinary-looking," she told Premiere magazine. "In fact, I know that I'm not. If anything, I've always felt that I was conventionally pretty, which is an asset in some ways, and in some ways not. It's a really hard subject to talk about. You know, it's like one of those things where you're fucked either way."

Although her romance with D.O.A. co-star Dennis Quaid would seem to be testimony to the contrary, Meg Ryan also has self-doubts. "I'm sexy sometimes, but I'm never going to be a glamor puss," she told Playboy. "I'm comfortable with people treating me like a goon."

Even more comfortable, sexy Samantha Fox reported, "People always ask me the same question: 'Do you think your looks have helped you?' I always say I don't think they've hindered [me] at all. If you look good, that means kids are going to stick your picture on the wall."

Another ravishing singer, Vanity, offered her own vigorous beauty hint: "I have a good complexion, partly because I work at it. If anything is there that shouldn't be, I squeeze it out. I'm so complexion conscious that I go around squeezing the faces of my friends, too."

Apparently, singers and actresses have a wide variety of ways to stay in shape. Belinda Carlisle runs 25 miles a week, works out with a trainer, plays tennis, hikes and rides a mountain bike. Justine Bateman chainsmokes, parties constantly and romances Leif Garrett incessantly. Hard to tell which lady looks better.

Pretty Phoebe Légère seemed quite proud of her body in the June Playboy, telling Contributing Editor Bruce Williamson, "People get mad because I don't buy into the patriarchal bullshit that the female body is disgusting. When one gazes appreciatively upon the female form, it's a religious act." But Légère backslid a bit in a later interview with Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, who said she had claimed, contrary to the obvious evidence, that the pix weren't even seminude and had commented, "I refused them about 200 times. I said, 'Over my dead body. I'm a Mayflower descendant and a Vassar graduate.'"

Towering over those who are still proud of their bodies is Greta Scacchi, whose triumph in White Mischief continued her tradition of taking off her clothes in nearly every film she has been in. And, fortunately, even after winning an Oscar for Moonstruck,Cher refused to become sensitive about her revealing fashions. "I think that Ronald Reagan looks very smart in his suit, you know? And Jim Bakker looks really nice and clean in his suit, and I'm sure that Nixon looked real tight in his suit, and I'm much more trustworthy than any two of them with my belly button showing."

However, Cher was dressed quite somberly in black pants, tunic and jacket when she appeared at a press conference with boyfriend Robert Camilletti after he was arrested and booked for investigation of felony assault with a deadly weapon (her Ferrari) of a photographer who was camped outside their Benedict Canyon home. Denying that her fella had deliberately tried to run down the paparazzo, Cher unloaded on the media. "I know that I have to give up lots of my rights, that people can write in a magazine that I, you know, don't have my rib cage or that this is not my chin or these are not my cheeks. I've been doing this for 25 years and so I'm pretty much used to having my private life destroyed and lies told about me." (For more Cher--lots more--see this month's Playboy Interview.)

Overcoming the troubles her explicit layouts once cost her, deposed former Miss America Vanessa Williams staged a comeback as a singer, cracking the top five on the charts with her single The Right Stuff. Recounting her struggle to be taken seriously after her slide from grace, Williams noted, "I knew it was going to be hard, but I knew I'd get there eventually. I don't like to be written off before being able to have a chance. I'm a fighter--I always try to prove that I've got what it takes."

Vanessa's old-fashioned spunk was inspiring, providing a frequently encountered clue to a new attitude. So many of our Sex Stars seem so--well--sensible. Not sensible, maybe, in the sense of good oxford shoes and a black canvas bumbershoot. But a lot of the things they are saying--about the values of life, of home and family and hard work, of giving up the wild life in favor of cottages and Keogh plans--just make so much sense.

Enjoying his multimillionaire status after a string of superhits--Top Gun, The Color of Money and Cocktail--plus his marriage to actress Mimi Rogers, Tom Cruise hopes his career will follow the steady path of his mentor, Paul Newman. "To be my age and to be this successful--I can't say I felt totally great about it in the beginning," Cruise reflected.

"Then I thought, Listen, this is where I want to be. You see some people who destroy themselves because they become successful and feel guilty about acknowledging it--and then it goes away. However terrible it is, I'm enjoying myself."

Supersensible Vanna White continued to turn her Wheel of Fortune letters into a career, appearing in an NBC miniseries, Goddess of Love. But she showed no interest in helping the producers revive Gypsy Angels, a film she'd shot as an unknown six years earlier. That one isn't quite in keeping with her image today as a goody-goody, though her shower scene is shown only in silhouette and reveals much less than her pre--Wheel of Fortune photos published by Playboy.

Still sensibly stringing together a respectable list of film and TV credits, voluptuous Virginia Madsen garnered good reviews in Mr. North, but the film wasn't a blockbuster and she's still awaiting her big break. One fringe benefit she picked up in the process, however, was a romance with the picture's director, Danny Huston, son of the late, legendary John.

When it comes to being sensible, a sense of humor helps. Still laughing after the breakup of his long marriage and a fling with "Crocodile" Dundee co-star Linda Kozlowski, Paul Hogan reported in the July Playboy Interview that he still doesn't think of himself as a sex symbol.

"The idea of sex symbol has become so distorted. In Australia, it means the latest young star on The Young Doctors or some soap, and it's almost a kiss of death. If some kid has got his TV work as a sex symbol, you know that within six months, he'll be unemployed. And that he has no sex appeal at all.... I'm just a short Clint Eastwood with a sense of humor."

Equally bemused, Sonia Braga pondered, "I catch myself sometimes in big shirts, socks, walking around the house with a coat over it, big T-shirts and the nose with the cold, also, the nose running, and I'm getting some coffee to drink, very sad, watching TV, reading a book--you know, thinking about someone who doesn't love me back--and then comes the newspaper, and it says, 'Sonia Braga, Sexy Star.'

"You look at the paper and look at the mirror and think, 'What are they talking about? Am I the sex symbol of Brazil?'"

Robert Redford, Braga's producer-director for The Milagro Beanfield War, certainly thought so, and photogs caught the two of them leaving his Manhattan apartment, fueling rumors of trouble at home with Lola, his wife of 30 years. Asked about the rumors a month later at the Cannes Film Festival, Redford laughed, "So it's out," setting off a furor among those European papers that took him seriously.

Media mogul Ted Turner was less reticent about the split from his wife. "There was no way I could keep my wife and girlfriend happy at the same time. I know it's unfair, but you've got to roll with the punches."

Singer Lionel Richie was definitely rolling with the punches when his unhappy wife, Brenda, caught him at the Beverly Hills apartment of his 22-year-old girlfriend, Diane Alexander. After what neighbors described as a noisy brawl--during which she kicked him in a particularly uncomfortable spot--it took several policemen to pull the Mrs. off the mistress.

Brenda was arrested on a long list of charges, including "corporal injury to a spouse," who allegedly received a swift kick in "the groin area." But Lionel doesn't seem to be singing any higher.

In the Old Hollywood, there was always a new wedding to balance each divorce. It's the same in the New Hollywood. Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds, who have been dating since 1982 and living together for four years, finally tied the knot, as did Michael J. Fox and his former Family Ties co-star Tracy Pollan after 14 months of courtship. It's hard to say which couple had the bigger ceremony. More quietly, Tom Hanks was married for the second time, to actress Rita Wilson.

Managing to keep their divorce plans and marriage neatly wrapped in the same package, Sean Penn and Madonna were relatively quiet this year, echoing complaints that the media make more of their spats than they do. In fact, Madonna said she has been misunderstood from the beginning. "I was surprised how people reacted to Like a Virgin, because when I did the song, to me, I was singing about how something made me feel a certain way--brand-new and fresh--and everyone else interpreted it as, 'I don't want to be a virgin anymore. Fuck my brains out.'"

But the unlikeliest bachelor of all to fall in 1988 was Playboy Editor and Publisher Hugh Hefner. After years of an inspirational single life, Hef announced his engagement to January Playmate Kimberley Conrad. His conversion came after a messy episode that would warn any bachelor about the potential dangers of cohabitation. Hefner was sued for $35,000,000 by Carrie Leigh, his live-in lady of more than four years. Her wild accusations and his countermoves--which resulted in a dismissal of her claims--were fully recounted in the August Playboy. All in all, it made marriage look good.

Although she was unfairly drawn into the mess, Mansion house guest Jessica Hahn didn't let the dirt deter her from a good time. Still in demand to talk about her experiences with televangelist Jim Bakker, Hahn was a frequent TV guest and constant partygoer; she also discovered that she was being treated by the same plastic surgeon as Michael Jackson.

Still single but with a new leading singing lady, Cat, proud Prince posed naked for his album cover on Lovesexy, which he promoted with a wild concert tour that was half orgy, half spiritual camp meeting. The nonspiritual part had Prince singing Head as Cat simulated said act on a microphone wedged between his legs.

Judging by her autobiography, I'm with the Band, former groupie Pamela Des Barres would once have been happy to do the real thing. Now she's too busy preparing a film of the book, which may star Ally Sheedy.

On balance, though, no Sex Star this year measures up to the copiously cantilevered Jessica Rabbit. What better love could a man have than a beautiful creature who will never change in any way? As she was drawn to our hearts in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jessica will always be with us, as loving and as lastingly perfect as Snow White. Besides, as one wag noted, she's the perfect mate: "She's loyal, she's got big tits and she has a steady job."

On a metaphysical level, perhaps Jessica does have a rival. Although he claims he has been dating regularly, comedian Richard Lewis says he has finally figured out who the woman of his dreams really is: himself. "I feel that the ideal woman is me in drag. I'm the only one I can get along with. If I could figure out how to marry myself, I would."

If the idea catches on, it could easily cut a Sex Stars chronicler's work in half. How simple it would be to track their romances--Gitte with Gitte, Sly with Sly, Cher and Cher alike.