Sex Stars of 1990

Except for mom and apple pie, there's nothing more wholesome than America's high school marching bands—particularly their wind sections, showcasing those promising players who are herewith celebrated in Playboy's Sax Stars of 1990. Psst, over here ... the preceding sentence is a smoke screen for those censors and Senators who seldom investigate thoroughly before deciding whether or not something is fit for citizens to see. Thus distracted, the censorious may not read on to discover that the actual Sex Stars of 1990 feature will discuss middle-aged men who court the sort of young women who grab their crotches and talk dirty in public, fathers who send weird gifts to their daughters, leading ladies who lampoon their private parts, rich men who ditch their wives for great sex with models in tight jeans and lots of alluring young lovelies who fortunately aren't illegal.

When Woody Allen once said he (text continued on page 180) would like to be reincarnated as Warren Beatty's finger tips, he never expected that line to be quoted as much as it was to promote Dick Tracy. Writers were reduced to citing Woody because Warren said little of interest after agreeing to come out of his lair to publicize the picture, likening interviews to prostate examinations. Everybody, of course, wanted to know about his affair with his leading lady, Madonna. But he would only say she's "more fun than a barrel of monkeys." That could be a cliché or, given Beatty's extensive romantic résumé, a genuine revelation about Madonna and/or monkeys and barrels. We can only guess.

She, at least, was more candid, confessing to Vanity Fair that she was sometimes intimidated by the possibility that 75 percent of the country wants Beatty's approval and 75 percent have had his body. "Sometimes I think, He's been with the world's most beautiful, most glamourous, talented women. I go, 'Oh, my God!' That's one part of me. I mean, how can I ever be as fabulous as Brigitte Bardot when she was twenty-five? Or Natalie Wood? Or any of those people? Then there is the other side of me that says I'm better than all of them."

Away from Warren, Madonna donned an armored brassiere and thrust her hand between her legs for her controversial Blond Ambition concert tour. When Toronto police protested that she was "lewd and obscene," Madonna insisted, "I ain't changing my fucking act" and her manager told the cops they would face 30,000 angry fans if they canceled her show. So they didn't.

Such attention was no surprise to Madonna's pal Sandra Bernhard after their mock-lesbian antics became tabloid fodder. "It was just the press picking up on something, because every time Madonna farts, they pick up on it. They want to see how it smells. I hate to break the news, but it smells like everybody else's farts. It's all so geeky, it's embarrassing. She likes it because she loves to cause controversy."

Under a test-case attack in Federal court for raunchy rap lyrics, 2 Live Crew was greeted on the road by teenage concert fans chanting, "We want some pussy! We want some pussy!" a wish the all-male group was presumably unable to fulfill. But 2, too, confounded censorious forces by pausing in its raps to allow the audience to supply the dirty words, daring watching gendarmes to jail the entire crowd.

Not every celebrity rates instant recognition from the cops. After giving a speeding ticket to gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer, a North Carolina highway-patrol trooper said he'd never seen The Fabulous Baker Boys or any of her other films that would inspire most males to rush forward with her $100 bail in hand. "We come into contact with all types of people," the officer explained. Mae West would have sighed that any bulge in his pants was most likely a gun.

Actually, were Mae alive today, she might have been more graphic. Celebrities are getting so matter-of-fact about their genitalia that they're in danger of losing their mystery, not to mention their fun. Discussing her AIDS-education efforts, the oft-quoted Madonna casually remarked to her Vanity Fair interviewer, "I have a pussy and I'm dealing with my sexuality and you can deal with yours if you want. I'm encouraging that. But I'm not saying go out and fuck randomly. You can have sex, but you have to practice safe sex.... Use your imagination. Be creative."

Less nobly, feisty Susan Tyrrell put forth her privates as analogy for her one-woman show, My Rotten Life: A Bitter Operetta. "If I'm gonna throw my legs open to the public, I want them to be so in love with what they see. I do have the pussy of a ten-year-old—so I'm not too worried."

With some justification, women insist such candor only claims a right long enjoyed by men. Speaking of the graphic female views of sex in her new novel, Surrender the Pink,Carrie Fisher protested, "Why is it men can write that they drag their cock out of their pants and they jack off and it hits the ceiling?" Because men lie, Carrie, because they lie.

But maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, told the truth when he explained (also to Vanity Fair) why he took up bodybuilding. "I was always interested in proportion and perfection. When I was fifteen, I took off my clothes and looked in the mirror. When I stared at myself naked, I realized that to be perfectly proportioned, I would need twenty-three-inch arms to match the rest of me."

It all comes down to that "dick thing" Denzel Washington and Spike Lee kept talking about in Mo' Better Blues. Or, as Richard Gere put it, "It's basically a psychoanalytical problem that America has. America's got this dick problem." His career healthy again with the success of Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman—and another very pretty woman, Revlon model Cindy Crawford, on his arm.

Given all the gutter talk, it was refreshing to see Sharon Stone (it's always refreshing to see Sharon) fall back on an old-fashioned word for the male member in the July Playboy. "I like a man whose brain is more expansive than his penis," she avowed. "Lips really do it for me: big, full lips. When I was fourteen, this boy told me he'd teach me how to kiss, how to feel it, how to give someone room to kiss you back.... I was always a great student."

Sharon obviously should get together with Tom Cruise, who told Playboy in January how, in third grade, he was trained to kiss by his sister's pals. "I would literally sprint home, because her friends were just starting to go out with boys and they would practice on me—put me on top of the sink and, you know, teach me how to kiss. And we'd spend hours after school. I knew when the girls were going to come by and I'd sprint home."

Critics have accused her of chewing the lips off her leading men, but beautiful Ellen Barkin likes the sexually aggressive women she plays in such films as Sea of Love. "It's kind of a nice thing for women to see a movie where the woman just likes to fuck and she's not a bad girl."

Some parents obviously believe it would be better if their celebrity offspring kept their lips zipped. After reading Kim Basinger's revelations about how she learned about oral sex, her father sent her a tennis ball and a roll of adhesive tape, suggesting, "When you give an interview and the feeling of being outrageous is present, please place this ball in your mouth and then tape your mouth shut. If you are still able to say 'oral sex' after doing this, then you are hopeless." Or much in demand.

Auditioning for a job in a brothel, Sherilyn Fenn opened her lips on TV's Twin Peaks and out popped a knotted cherry stem. She was instantly hired and women went into tongue training all over the country. The scene elevated Sherilyn to stardom in director David Lynch's well-attended, offbeat TV series. Happily, however, we can lay claim to having spotted Fenn's fine features two years ago, when she barebacked through several scorching scenes in Two Moon Junction, though a lot of people still haven't made the connection between the ravishing blonde in that picture and the ravishing brunette in Twin Peaks. (For more of Sherilyn, see Fenn-tastic! elsewhere in this issue.)

Another veteran of Lynch's films, Kyle MacLachlan, also hit it big on Peaks, playing a very odd FBI agent who's supposedly about as strange as the actor is off stage ("dedicated and dirty-minded," American Film declared in an unusually lusty judgment). Meanwhile, Lynch continued to push (continued on page 197)Sex Stars(continued from page 180) for new heights of the sexually bizarre with his Wild at Heart, starring Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage, who sizzle on the big screen while Lynch's TV creations can only simmer. Cage, who has his own reputation for weirdness—"Normalcy, to me, is a fantasy," he insists—likens women to old cars: "There are a lot of problematic '67s out there.... They're beautiful to look at but not meant to be driven. You drive them once and they break down. Then you have to strip the car down, sell it or plant a Molotov cocktail in the gas pipe and see what happens. Otherwise, you have a lot of car payments, and you even have a total overhaul, which could involve a lobotomy."

Dern, Cage's co-star, found some Wild scenes, such as the one in which she gets down on her knees to lick the crotch of Cage's pants, "embarrassing." But, in a way, the sexpot she plays is "completely in control ... Not only do I get sexually satisfied but I never give myself away."

There are all kinds of control. Pretty Virginia Madsen, in Hot Split, warns her partner, "I'm fucking you to death." That gives us pause. Virginia, could we just do it till we get sick?

Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays prostitutes in Miami Blues and Last Exit to Brooklyn, says she found her characters' feelings "complicated. You're getting paid to be humiliated, so you feel this amazing power that you have, but at the same time, you know you're the one crawling on your hands and knees, being fucked up the ass."

Hookers are definitely hot in Hollywood this year. Take Pretty Woman, which features Julia Roberts as the titular call-girl. Before shooting started, Julia assured her mom that the film was a "Disney movie"—overlooking the fact that Pretty Woman was being made for Touchstone, Disney's adult division. Playing her best friend in the business is Laura San Giacomo, whose performance in last year's sex, lies, and videotape inspired People's Ralph Novak to observe that "her sweaty grapplings with Peter Gallagher are enough to give meaningless lust back its good name."

Speaking of lust, an on-set spy reports in the June Playboy that Mickey Rourke and Carré Otis kept at each other long after the cameras ran out of film while shooting the climactic love scene of Wild Orchid. What were they really up to? The question remains unanswered, except for the smile on Carré's face.

Cindy Crawford, incidentally, was set for the Otis part but withdrew because she was shy about the amount of nudity required. Seems to be an issue with several actors these days. Daryl Hannah says there are few films in which nudity is important. "I mean, I don't make European films with atmosphere." Well, not since her bow in 1982's Summer Lovers, filmed in Greece and affording generous helpings of Hannah.

After appearing naked in The Hunt for Red October,Alec Baldwin protested to Premiere, "It's uncomfortable for me. Women think that guys are like, Here, babe. Get a naked girl on top of me and have some fun.' It's not. It's very uncomfortable. There's always people around."

Family man Mel Gibson has shown his rear in three of his past four films, but that's as far as he'll go. Steamy love scenes, he says, "are a lot of times unnecessary. Bird on a Wire originally had one of those scenes, but it wasn't really needed, so I didn't do it."

Fortunately for us, Margaux Hemingway opted to put some fire under her career with a pictorial in the May Playboy, though "I never thought of myself as the Playboy type—long, skinny legs, big boobs, perfect ass." She needn't have worried and we're happy she ultimately concluded, "I can't tell you how good it feels to want to show off a little again."

Two porn superstars who have gone into mainstream films, on the other hand, have found themselves blushing. Of trying to play a brazen teenager in Cry-Baby,Traci Lords said, "It was so embarrassing doing that—sticking my boobs out, licking my lips." Ginger Lynn Allen interrupted shooting on Hollywood Boulevard Part II to wonder, "Why are my nipples hard in the jungle?" Ginger's co-star Ken Wright expressed to Premiere a cautious reason for keeping his clothes on in her presence. "I had it written into my contract that I never take my pants off," Wright explained, outlining his fear of catching something. "I almost didn't do this film." Somehow seems less than gallant, when you think about it.

Kevin Costner wanted to change pants for his role as Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves. "If I end up in tights, you'll know there was one hell of a battle," he announced prior to production. "I'm only trying them on in the security of my own home, so I can be the judge."

Rob Lowe raised eyebrows again this year with his role in Bad Influence, in which he video-tapes people having sex. His character has Mephistophelean overtones, as sweet Lisa Zane observes when she says, "Sleep with the Devil and sooner or later, you have to fuck." These days, Lowe is seen jogging around UCLA, in a brazen wardrobe consisting of a pair of bright-pink running shorts and a shirt decorated with suggestively undraped women. Whether because of the outfit or because of his reputation, Lowe attracts a lot of attention from female admirers. But, he avowed to Interview magazine, he never takes advantage of them. "In no way would I ever assume when I meet some girl that she wants to sleep with me; that doesn't enter my mind. I think somebody who did assume that would be such an insufferably arrogant person that you couldn't be around him."

Andrew Dice Clay does assume that every woman wants him, at least in Hollywood. "I come out to L.A. and it's, like, any girl you meet, they're going, 'Hey, why don't you come over?' " he told Vanity Fair. "I just couldn't believe it. They were filthier than the guys. I'd have guns pulled on me by chicks—I woke up another time handcuffed to my window. And she's laughing like some real sicko." Does this make Clay an insufferably arrogant person whom others don't want to be around? Well, several ladies refused to appear with him on Saturday Night Live and Twentieth Century Fox abandoned plans to release his concert film.

Speaking of arrogance—insufferable to some, admirable to others—Donald Trump took an imperial pose as his wife, Ivana, fought for possession with model Marla Maples. The light, which hit the headlines after a scrap in Aspen, continued in court, where Ivana is seeking to undo a prenuptial agreement. Trump characteristically looked upon both of his blondes in planetary fashion—with himself as the sun, of course. "I've made a lot of satellites," The Donald boasted. "Hey, whether it's Marla or Ivana. Marla can do any movie she wains to now. Ivana can do whatever she wants."

Professing to "fall in love with love, not money," Maria swears she will never sign something so "shallow" as a prenuptial agreement. She may not have to worry. As the financial problems of his empire worsened, Trump was showing no rush to fill Maples' No Excuses jeans with wedded assets.

When his own short marriage to Sarah Owen ended, James Woods proclaimed lasting gratitude to his lawyer for a prenuptial agreement with the Mrs., noting, "My life would have been a sheer and utter disaster without ii." A magazine piece on prenups quoted the actor as saying his attorney had warned him the marriage wouldn't last six months and, sure enough, trouble started alter the wedding coordinator introduced Sarah to another man.

A ten-year gag order on the divorce of David and Angela Bowie ran out this year, freeing her to go on TV to claim she'd once caught her husband in bed with Mick Jagger. "It's no big deal," she said. "I didn't say I saw them on the job." Jagger called the allegation "complete rubbish" and David responded via a spokesperson that he never comments on "any of the ridiculous things that Angela has to say."

Lighten up, David. When people slop saving things, ridiculous or otherwise, about you, you won't be a Sex Star anymore.