Glamourcon

Glamourcon is a cosmos of its own. It's easy to find: Enter the Los Angeles Airport Marriott and take the escalator down. The mirrored hall below is a whole other world, terra in flagrante. This is the party the pin-up world throws once a year, the biggest collection of nude photos this side of Charlie Sheen's wallet. This is where a girl doffs her fur coat outside the Imperial Ballroom. She wears a few strips of leather underneath. She stretches, poses and asks you to take her picture.

Glamourcon is the world's largest marketplace for "glamour art." On display are vintage pin-ups, magazines, calendars, sexy movie ads, even such once-taboo items as leather gear and bondage catalogs. Like other recent booms in comic books and sports cards, the hobby is driven by rarity: This market's golden fleece is the first Playboy, the 1953 Marilyn Monroe issue. Now worth upwards of $10,000, it is as valuable as some of the rarest collectibles. "The Honus Wagner baseball card that Wayne Gretzky bought is worth more, but I'd rather look at Marilyn," says one collector.

Glam fans once traded purely on nostalgia. Now the times are catching up. "We're bigger than ever. We're getting more modern," says Bob Schultz, who launched the convention in 1991. In those days the annual weekend was a gathering of a few pin-up enthusiasts. Since then it has grown to a Kama Sutra Bowl.

"Look around you," Schultz said last April. "Where else can you find all this?"

The hall is a whirl of breasts and hips, laughter and commerce. Picture a Star Trek convention on Planet Sex. Exhibitors hawk hot videos, suggestive compact discs, Vampirella calendars. Women strut past you in necklines that aren't just plunging, they're in free fall. A girl wears a Tan Naked T-shirt. Hobbyists and pro collectors bid $100 for a Pamela Anderson trading card, $35 for Playboys from the year Pamela was born, $18 for vintage boxer shorts, $5 for a catalog featuring blindfolds and maid uniforms. Artist David Nestler sells his most noted work, a giant duct-taped girl. Here sits Apollonia, Prince's former girlfriend, all shiny with her purple nails, rock candy earrings and glossy black hair. She sells signatures for ten dollars. Two scary, gangstalooking guys stride up and demand her attention. Worried, Apo puts up her hands. "Anything you want," she says. Then they perform a perfect duet of her hit song Sex Shooter.

Across from Apollonia stands another brunette beauty. She stars in lacy catalogs. "I'm a ham," says Persephone, who never expected Glamourcon to get so big. "I guess we're getting trendy," she says. "A lot of it is them."

Persephone nods to the spotlighted center of the exhibition hall, the cosmic hub. That's where video display terminals, CD-ROMs and security guards surround four rows of Playboy Playmates, this year's special guests. Here's Miss August 1956 Jonnie Nicely, 1996 Playmate of the Year Stacy Sanches and more than 50 others, all signing photos, magazines and business cards for thousands of hungry collectors. Here's Playmate Cynthia Myers, who went from the centerfold to a lead role in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and calls the latter an anticlimax. "Being Miss December 1968, that was my highlight," says Cynthia, whose soldier fans made her an instrument of psychological warfare in Vietnam. They left her centerfold in Viet Cong territory, daring the enemy to compare their women to ours. The battleship-sized Playboy exhibit eclipses the rest of the room. Persephone remembers when this was a smaller event where a girl who looked good in chains could be a star. "But I don't mind. They're pretty," she says.

These days the Playmates rule the ballroom--rows of famous names, measurements and turn-ons. They sign centerfolds in gold ink, turning glossy paper into prizes collectors can fight over. They smile. They shake fans' hands. They cloud men's vision.

A cowboy-hatted dude leaving the ballroom shakes his head. "My eyes are worn out," he says.

You can blame much of the eyestrain on Bettie Page. A brunette cover girl, Bettie wore bikinis and a Doris Day smile on the covers of Police Gazette and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the Fifties. She also appeared in such early girlie magazines as Stare, Leg Show and--wink-wink--Modern Sunbathing. She was an uncommon sex object. Even when she appeared nude in the racier magazines, including posing as Playboy's Miss January in 1955, (continued on page 159)Glamourcon(continued from page 119) Bettie wasn't a bombshell like Marilyn Monroe, stripper Blaze Starr and pin-up girl Irish McCalla. She was naughty and nice, somehow suggesting forbidden fruit and apple pie at the same time. Which made it all the more shocking when America's secret sweetheart began appearing bound and gagged in under-the-counter bondage photos. It was all in the game for Bettie, who saw bondage as one more way of cavorting with the camera. But then, in 1958, she disappeared.

Before long Page's fans were collecting and trading Bettie memorabilia. Their hobby soon embraced all sorts of sexy items. Today's Glamourcon still features the traditional Bettie Page look-alike contest, and you'll see vintage Lili St. Cyr movie posters beside classic issues of Sir! magazine. But there's modern glam as well: topless holograms, voluptuous robots and Pasta Erotica noodles in unlikely shapes. This is where the girl modeling latex underwear lends her pen to the guy hawking sexy CD-ROMs. Yes, it's where the rubber meets the info highway.

"We got a big boost when he started coming," says Schultz, nodding toward a hubbub at the door. In walks Hugh M. Hefner, moving slowly, signing autographs, ringed by flashbulbs and grasping hands like a prizefighter. The convention gained stature when Playboy's founder recognized it as the field's official shindig. As a veteran exhibitor says, "We're legit. Hey, we're on the TV news now."

And fast outgrowing the Imperial Ballroom. You can barely move without jostling an underwear model or Vampirella impersonator. Hef and his small posse move past a bank of TV monitors. The screens show him hosting Lenny Bruce and Nat King Cole on Playboy After Dark. He reaches the hub, greets the Playmates, nods like Captain Kirk as he inspects the Playboy exhibit. Suddenly a chemist bursts from the crowd. Don Troy, 38, waves a piece of the past at the publisher--nothing less than the 1953 Marilyn Monroe Playboy, which Troy got for $1200 in 1990. A lifelong collector, Troy took his prize from its safe-deposit box and flew here from Chicago, hoping to get Hef to sign it.

"I can't turn that down," Hef says--and, with one scrawl, doubles the magazine's value.

Glamourcon is "part of the retro phenomenon that includes James Bond, the Beatles--a wide range of Hollywood collectibles as well as pin-up art," says Hefner. "Glamourcon is special to us at Playboy," he says, "because it is rooted in what was called Good-Girl Art, a style of pin-up art I was very aware of when I was growing up." The naughty but nice, daring yet lighthearted spirit he saw in such pin-up queens as Irish McCalla, the sultry star of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, influenced the magazine he invented. This year Hefner made his invention's command of the event official, approving the ballroom's gleaming central display and its celebrity Playmates.

"The Playmates are as important as movie stars here," he says. "That's gratifying to me because it shows that the Playmate represents something more than a photo feature. Their fans, of course, never forget." The hutchmaster understands fandom. "I'm a kid who had pinups on his wall. I participate in the fans' romantic nostalgia," he says. "You know, if I hadn't created the magazine, I'd probably be on the other side. I'd be a fan."

Fans line up and Playmates sign, adding worth to every curved collectible they put their special Playmate pens to. Occasionally a collector offers the ultimate compliment: "I will never sell this one."

"We have a responsibility here," says Miss May 1991 Carrie Yazel. "Playboy's presence matters. We have to look classy. We have to be classy. This isn't Panty Express anymore." Yazel, a blonde in a slightly tight yet businesslike black dress, says she and 20 other Playmates had a lunch meeting to plan their appearance here. Hence the clean lines of their New York black dresses and suits today--a sharp contrast to Bondage Darla and the nearby Indian maiden wearing a see-through hatchet belt.

"We're here to have a little fun, make a little money and make Glamourcon legitimate and professional," Carrie says.

She makes it sound like a business meeting. Which is what Glamourcon is becoming as it grows. Still, glam has qualities that won't soon fall prey to accountants. In the course of interviewing Carrie Yazel, you ask for her Playboy trading card. It features her without the businesslike dress or anything else.

"I think we're succeeding," she says. "Don't you?"

Know your Playmates! In case you weren't able to identify them all, here's some help. (1) Christina Leardini, (2) Rebecca Ferratti, (3) Patty Duffek, (4) Carmen Berg, (5) Tina Bockrath, (6) Monique Noel, (7) Rhonda Adams, (8) Jennifer Lavoie, (9) Bonnie Marino, (10) Michele Drake, (11) Reagan Wilson, (12) Debi Nicolle Johnson, (13) Marianne Gravatte, (14) Moreno Corwin, (15) Marlene Janssen, (16) Carrie Yazel, (17) Donna Perry, (18) Janet Quist, (19) Jonnie Nicely, (20) Petra Verkaik, (21) Nancy Harwood, (22) Patti Reynolds, (23) Hef, (24) Judy Tyler, (25) Victoria Valentino, (26) Cathy Rowland, (27) Alana Soares, (28) Elisa Bridges, (29) Rachel Jeán Marteen, (30) Donna Edmondson, (31) Gwen Wong, (32) Stacy Sanches, (33) Sharon Johansen, (34) Echo Johnson, (35) Helena Antonaccio, (36) Victoria Fuller, (37) Monique St. Pierre, (38) Angela Melini, (39) Cathy St. George, (40) Peggy McIntaggart, (41) Bonnie Large, (42) Ola Ray, (43) Helle Michaelsen, (44) Jessica Lee, (45) Lillian Müller, (46) Gina Goldberg, (47) Karin Taylor, (48) Lisa Baker, (49) DeDe Lind, (50) Julie Lynn Cialini, (51) Cyndi Wood, (52) Cynthia Myers, (53) Debbie Boostrom, (54) Lisa Marie Scott, (55) Carole Vitale, (56) Lisa Welch