Sex Stars of the Centuty

As the millennium approaches, people try to get you to think about the best books you didn't read, the best speeches you never heard and the best movies you never saw. Not us. We want you to think about something close to your heart. There are women you think are pretty. There are women you think are beautiful. And then there are women you think about for the rest of your life. That's why we decided to take the helpful step and name those inspiring creatures. How many truly magical women have walked the planet this century? We declare there are a nice round 100 and are so bold as to rank them. (text continued on page 214) Sex Stars of the Century(continued from page 105) We gave the task of explaining our choices to our silver-tongued Contributing Editor D. Keith Mano, whose memory and eye for detail are legendary. What follows is the rhyme and reason for this exercise. Did we mention we are also including pictures?

100. I, who live life in the exact-change lane, began gasping when I first saw Lillian Müller, 1976 Playmate of the Year. Everything about her seemed to have its own private focus. Müller could make even your nose get hard.

99. Tall, dark, pseudoexotic (Dutch, really) and willing to dance more or less nude, Mata Hari was the toast of Paris in 1905. In 1917 she was just plain toast--shot by the French for being a German spy, though the whole affair may have been orchestrated to draw attention from French gaffes on the battlefield.

98. Blaze Starr, you'll recall, was the stripper who had a good old boy kind of affair with Louisiana Governor Earl Long in the late Fifties. Plus ça change, y'all, plus c'est la même chose.

97. With breasts the size of church kneelers and an explosive bottle-blonde wig, the 5'0" Dolly Parton once said, "It's a good thing I was born a woman, or else I'd have been a drag queen."

96. DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967, was the most popular Playmate during the Vietnam war. Though shy, she is cuter than dim sum and, yes, freckled, as if young trout were swimming in her cleavage.

95. Think of those mighty thighs and how, axel by axel, they lifted Katarina Witt's sophisticated grace to four ice skating world championships, two Olympic golds and, in those preposterously sexy hams, her very own pedestal of shining flesh.

94. Actress Carroll Baker is a palomino, blonde on blonde on blonde. Watching her performance as Baby Doll (in the film of the same name) is like taking Viagra by I.V. drip.

93. OK, maybe it's not so hard to look luscious when you're being hung spread-eagle as an ape's entree. On the other hand (which is also the title of Fay Wray's autobiography), there was something peculiarly wrenching in the sound of that Betty Boop voice when it escalated from playful squeak to primal shriek.

92. Actress Diana Dors, born Mavis Fluck, whose lower lip was plump as a stuffed grape leaf, called herself "the only sex symbol England has produced since Lady Godiva."

91. The Marilyn Chambers look is rare and improbable. Everything about her has an uptilt: cheeks, mouth, breasts, pelvis, all sort of sexily slung. Whether in Ivory Snow or behind the X-rated Green Door, Chambers always appeared ravishing and ravished at the same time.

90. Lynda Carter, who as Wonder Woman used to go around wearing something like colored linoleum, is understatedly glamorous, if no longer invincible, with a navel you could slide a Susan B. Anthony dollar into.

89. A petite, exuberant Oscar-nominated actress (for Come Back, Little Sheba), Terry Moore also played a nicer Fay Wray to Mighty Joe Young's smaller King Kong--and secretly married Howard Hughes, for which she was handsomely reimbursed.

88. Julie Newmar was the superbodacious Stupefyin' Jones in Li'l Abner both on film and on Broadway. Newmar's catchy face and wall-to-wall 5'11" body defibrillated you right where you stood.

87. A silent-film star in America and Germany, Louise Brooks, from all accounts, had an insatiable sex drive to go with the pert bobbed hair and the legs as powerful as charged fire hoses.

86. A talented British actress made a celebrity by several notorious wet T-shirt scenes, Jacqueline Bisset either looked too much like Jackie O or (as in The Greek Tycoon) not enough.

85. With the face of an almost cartoonish Varga Girl, beauty Loni Anderson, former star of the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati, now appears in ninja films. Her nunchakus are majestic.

84. I know you couldn't get it up for Mommie Dearest and her wire hangers. But think of the young Joan Crawford (in Grand Hotel, say) with eyes as big as follow spots, whose radiant smile today would require an environmental impact statement.

83. I was 13 in 1955 when Janet Pilgrim (then Playboy's subscription manager) first appeared as a Centerfold. I remember taping her photo under a bureau drawer, where my mother promptly found it. Mother absorbed Janet's sweet, almost Asian face and her mammoth spheres of influence and said, "She's very pretty," and handed the photo back. I owe a lot to Janet Pilgrim's innocence.

82. Film actress Gene (Laura, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) Tierney was as sensuous as the Fertile Crescent. She had deep cheek hollows and kinky, tent peg-shaped teeth that made her lips seem, um, oral and sore.

81. Shannon Tweed has the best legs of the century. They support an extraordinary 6-foot-tall woman who has been a star of Falcon Crest and more than 30 films, as well as 1982 PMOY. Thinking of her too much can cause a cerebrovascular accident.

80. Actress Linda Evans, here seen at prayer, is as lovely as a gas-ripened peach in January.

79. Lena Horne is a lusty, charismatic songteller and actress. Considered the first black female film star, she has a smile as electric as a plasma torch and torrid eyes the color of grand pianos.

78. Gypsy Rose Lee was one of the first burlesque luminaries to make taking off one's clothes respectable. Goosed along by her pushy stage mother, Gypsy was starring at Minsky's on Broadway by 1931. When burlesque was closed down in New York, she went to Hollywood and later to TV and eventually wrote her autobiography, Gypsy, from which the musical was made.

77. Liv, as in PMOY 1972 Liv Lindeland, means "life" in Norwegian. She was Playboy's first full frontal Playmate. LL's crystal blonde smile lit every part of her, from those dark, suggestive eyes right down to her warm fiord.

76. A twelve-time Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and video fitness queen, Kathy Ireland--of the sexy brown caterpillar eyebrows--has more definitions than Webster's.

75. Dame Diana Rigg, the first Mrs. James Bond, star of The Avengers (playing sexy, leather-clad Mrs. Peel), Tony award winner for Medea, tall, graceful as a bullwhip, with wide-spaced, secretive eyes, can be a walking double entendre when she feels like it.

74. A famous pin-up of U.S. grunts in Vietnam, December 1968 Playmate Cynthia Myers doesn't use a bra--she uses two hard hats and a lot of scaffolding.

73. Irish McCalla was Sheena: Queen, of the Jungle. I used to buy Sheena comic books for ten cents and I would (very carefully) erase Sheena's leopard-spot outfit (where'd she get it? Frederick's of the Congo?). Then I'd draw Sheena's body with a gia-gunda pair of nude knockers and resell the comic for a buck.

72. Sloe-eyed model Cheryl Tiegs, who must have more vertebrae in her neck than anyone else, is still, after four husbands, as lithe as a gazelle.

71. Light-coffee-to-go in a linguine-string dress, the ensorcelling Janet Jackson--who looks like she would be good enough to drink and eat--won Soul Train's Lena Horne Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 31.

70. Iconoclastic (she has said that modeling sucks), world-wise (her parents escaped from communist Czechoslovakia) and as lovely as a solar wind, you aren't surprised--blink!--when Paulina Porizkova's eye color changes naturally to accommodate her wardrobe.

69. Lili St. Cyr invented the reverse striptease (she began her act nude, in a bathtub). Lili was incomprehensibly gorgeous, with a face like a carved alabaster cameo, and I, at the age of ten or so, prayed for her happiness every night when I went to bed.

68. Anna Nicole Smith is as well endowed as Harvard. Her selection as 1993 PMOY represented a filling-out of our ideal cultural physique. And lawdy, what man wouldn't ache to fire a few shots from her grassy knoll?

67. Ava Gardner was the queen of chin music. We're not talking about anything so obvious as a dimple here. This was a major cleft--in fact, Gardner's chin represented a cherub's vulva. And her skin was perfect--more icing than epidermis.

66. From 1984's Blame It on Rio, in which Demi Moore's breasts seemed blown out of a bubble pipe, to 1996's Striptease, in which they were jubilant muscles, through pregnancy and body painting, it has been an intimate, almost civic pleasure to watch Demi grow.

65. Unspoiled, mischievous, with hair the color of UPS trucks, British mannequin Naomi Campbell's Coca-Cola eyes flash as she models what seems to be a Roman centurion's negligee.

64. With pellucid eyes and a mysterious upper lip that turns in on itself like a Möbius strip (plus three well-deserved Oscar nominations), Michelle Pfeiffer gives me sweet angina.

63. Sally Rand, nightclub performer, sewed ostrich feathers together and created a nudie fan dance that scandalized the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Rand danced until she was 74, sometimes with five-foot plastic bubbles.

62. Game, set and, with Jimmy Connors, a match for 20 years. In her photo shoots, PMOY 1977 Patti McGuire almost always made potent, provocative eye contact with the reader. It was hard to tell: You or Patti--who was the voyeur?

61. It's a wonder that Stephanie Seymour can stand up at all. Her body is so lissome and spectacular that even her groin seems double-jointed. It's as if she were a kit out of which a woman might finally be constructed--knees, ankles, thighs are in place, all they need is a little airplane glue and some time to dry.

60. Brown and soft as antler velvet, the ravishing Christie Brinkley is bien dans sa peau (at home in her own skin), as the French say of those who are supremely natural and spontaneous. She makes my heart go pan-pan-pan.

59. Eyes you could skinny-dip in, a mouth as lyrical as the sound hole of a Stradivarius--even in this exalted gathering and after more than 200 magazine covers, Claudia Schiffer is still the prototypical beauty of our time.

58. One question in particular haunted our American sexual conscience at the end of the Sixties: Should the ultra-sexy, Asian-eyed Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie show her navel? Eden never did, imbuing her belly button, for me at least, with almost occult meaning.

57. Everything about stripper Tempest Storm--including her name--was exaggerated and titillative. TS smeared lipstick almost to her nose, and on her stupendulous breasts she wore pasties the size of yarmulkes.

56. For me, Barbi Bentonwas Playboy (heck, hadn't Hef put his imprimatur on her?). Barbi is bright, otter-sleek, athletic, positive, talented, clear-eyed, American and blue-veiner sexy--with breasts like puppies, a killer smile and tan lines she must have had since birth.

55. I've saved the simple word exquisite for Dorothy Stratten, killed by a jealous husband in 1980. A Chinese poet defines beauty as "love touched by death."

54. Vanna White, co-host on Wheel of Fortune since 1982, walks and claps for a living. She is as delicate-looking as a sea horse, with eyes that, like great wine, are "light held together by moisture."

53. Christa Speck's size-38 pontoons helped carry her as 1962 PMOY. She had a beehive hairdo that would have qualified her to stand guard outside Buckingham Palace.

52. The first film superstar to be confected by publicity, silent actress Theda Bara played such notable vamps as Cleopatra, Salome and Carmen. In this photo she seems to have gotten her bra from a hot-pretzel stand.

51. Greta Garbo was a bit gawky, truth be told. She had eyebrows the shape of buggy whips and teeth that were crooked from processing her accent. But underneath all this there was a comical passion as inscrutable and horny as a Gibraltar ape's behind.

50. Her smile is as broad as general delivery, but her gaze has an empathetic poignance. Suzanne Somers overcame a difficult childhood (her father was an alcoholic), and she has since founded the Institute for the Effects of Addictions on the Family.

49. For those who turn on to that eternal prep-school sweater-sleeves-tied-around-the-waist attitude, Brooke Shields is not just the sexiest woman alive, she's the only woman ever. The nude shots in Pretty Baby, taken when she was 13, were a breakthrough in American prurience.

48. Candy Barr was the Empress of Ecdysiasts back when there was serious competition--such as Irma the Body and Evelyn "$50,000 Treasure Chest" West. Barr was Jack Ruby's girlfriend in 1963 and later was shot by a jealous wife.

47. Halle Berry, with her Chiclets smile, is the luscious color of caramel on crème brÛlée. "Being sweet and nice to people," she says, "goes a long, long way."

46. With those bee-stung bimbette lips (she never broke a smile when posing), 1964 PMOY Donna Michelle didn't come across as the concert pianist-ballet dancer she was--but her breasts were as cuddly as gophers in a petting zoo.

45. C.S. Lewis might have been writing of Catherine Deneuve's sexsational performance as the hooker-housewife in Buñuel's Belle de Jour when he wrote that "innocence through modesty becomes lasciviousness." The more lamblike she is, the more she inspires rut.

44. Sure, you knew Mae West was sexy, but did you know she was also the highest-paid American woman in 1935? She wrote, directed and starred in several Broadway plays, appeared in her first flick when she was almost 40 and wrote her own screenplays. No wonder she said, "Start without me." She was busy.

43. Film star Hedy Lamarr was often endangered by her beauty. One lover even tried to get her into an industrial-strength chastity belt. When that failed, he molded a replica of Hedy from plastic and rubber and raped it when the original wouldn't comply. Still frustrated, he shot a dangling earring off her earlobe.

42. In the steam-filled shower scene from Dressed to Kill,Angie Dickinson (and her great body double) fetch out orgasms so rapturous and authentic that they'd be enough to dilate a spinster's cervix. And all without troubling her mascara.

41. Born in St. Louis, black American dancer-chanteuse Josephine Baker was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, made her home in Paris, toured Europe and America for 50 years and spied for the Allies in North Africa. She was also known to dance nude but for a girdle of rubber bananas.

40. The Jazz Age's It girl was the child of an abusive father. Clara Bow's sex drive was insatiable, and legend claims she did it with the entire USC football team. Bow was a captivating silent star, but the advent of talkies revealed her to have a prodigious Brooklyn accent, plus "mike fright." Bow was forced into retirement before she hit 30.

39. Silver Anniversary Playmate Candy Loving is an exercise in softness. She seems always to be just on the edge of complete sexual meltdown, which Shakespeare's Cleopatra called "discandying."

38. Joan Collins' playfully evil presence--in its Venus-flytrap eyelashes and dark-cheekbone parapet--gives the impression of someone who is ruthlessly willing to maximize her recumbency.

37. Once thought to be as defunct as the slide rule industry, ex-Miss America Vanessa Williams is now a triumphant and bankable singer-dancer-actress with shimmering blue-green eyes and the immense drive of a body-stopper bullet.

36. Heather Locklear has a unique crumple zone built into her upper lip that twitches with sarcasm whenever, as supreme bitch Amanda Woodward of Melrose Place, she smiles--even when in innocence.

35. Flaunting an attitude--and her armpit hair--Madonna starred in a September 1985 Playboy pictorial. It was a spectacularly raw and complex transaction between model and voyeur, a transaction she elaborated in her raw and charismatic book, Sex.

34. Linda Lovelace, her front tooth out of line, looked so ordinary--despite her shaved pubes--that she became profoundly arousing. This was no unattainable sex diva giving head down to her toes; this was the barmaid, the bank teller, the intern. Deep Throat, made for $24,000 in 1972, has generated more than $100 million since.

33. A week after my father's death I found some pictures of Bettie Page in his personal file--the same photos, pretty much, that I had in my file. Page was more than our most famous underground pin-up girl, she was a legacy that connected the generations.

32. German film star Marlene Dietrich flashed nudity, wore men's clothing and told Hitler to go stuff his swastika. During her sexual prime--which lasted approximately 60 years--she jumped into more strange beds than Bernadette Castro, the Castro Convertible girl.

31. When German actress Elke Sommer smiles, little puckers form at the corners of her mouth, making a sexy pout like a drawstring purse. Sommer is an exhibited artist who speaks seven languages and is here shown projecting 100-watt thigh glare.

30. Though dubbed the Bosom by Playboy in 1958, actress June Wilkinson, as you can see from our photo, also had loins that went on forever.

29. Mamie Van Doren has had a full career from B-movie queen (and wife to Ray Anthony), to jetset life with Joe Namath, to New Wave singer, to her aptly titled autobiography, Playing the Field.

28. I was always surprised at the considerable effect Jane Fonda had on me sexually. Athletic, with breasts sharp as box cutters and commas around her mouth that made everything she said seem in quotation marks, Jane was vulnerable and sweet underneath. Now every October I watch her fall asleep on Ted Turner's lapel.

27. January 1960 Playmate Stella Stevens could look as cute as a scholarship student at twirling camp. Yet as an actress, her oeuvre--especially The Ballad of Cable Hogue--is distinguished and far too overlooked.

26. Alfred Hitchcock said that actress and (later) princess Grace Kelly had "sexual elegance." By this he meant, I think, that she could have been nude, possibly, but never naked.

25. As well as anyone, Lana Turner could express the nuts-and-bolts business of making love on-screen. She more or less ate a cigarette. And Turner was so voluptuous in her World War II sweater and skirt that you could almost see her ovulate.

24. Sharon Stone unwove her springbok legs and, in that flash of pink, cinematic sexuality clicked into a new, freer mode. One of the very (very) few women in whose presence laughter and a hard-on can coexist.

23. A photo shoot of Elle "the Body" Macpherson turns out looking like stock footage from the Creation story in Genesis. If, as it is said, ordinarily statuesque women are "built," then cool, magnificent Elle must have been calved like an iceberg from a glacier.

22. At the age of ten, I began to think about saving Jane Russell's life. Monroe and Mansfield and Lamarr, you understand, wouldn't have me, but Jane had a wanton look that said, "Sure, kid, daydream all you want." I'll always be grateful.

21. The preeminent architect Stanford White seduced 16-year-old Evelyn Nesbit, who used to ride nude on a red velvet swing. Nesbit was so childlike under that salvo of dark hair that you thought if she smiled, she'd still have her milk teeth.

20. Most women just have breasts. Gina Lollobrigida, however, was one of those special women who had a bosom, which is something more substantial, like a piece of furniture, a magnificent credenza, maybe. In Italy around 1950, bosoms were called lollos.

19. Ursula Andress (Honey Ryder in Dr. No) has what are known as backlit eyes. They glow from inside like Pacific tide pools at twilight.

18. Film actress Kim Novak taught me about the power of napes. She had--along with luna moth eyebrows and exceptional teeth--this butch haircut that made her look like a great guy from behind. Does that mean I'm gay? One can only hope.

17. Fox insured Betty Grable's lissome gams for $1 million. A pin-up photo that posed her looking back over one shoulder was the most popular with GIs in 1943, when BG was Hollywood's number one box office attraction.

16. Farrah Fawcett has a face that's enchanting enough to drive a human hair through wood. I knew the first gentle sexuality of my male children by how they responded to her playful poster in their room. Hers were the most prominent clothed nipples in America.

15. There are no still photographs of Jenny McCarthy. As her stint on MTV's Singled Out showed, Jenny never just lies there like prosciutto on melon. Her superjock bod and angel face, like a futurist statue, streamline the air around her.

14. I remember being just a little afraid of Swedish actress Anita Ekberg--afraid of being absorbed by her. When you looked at any part of Anita (whether chubby knuckle or abyssal cleavage) you knew you were seeing only the tip of the Ekberg.

13. Swedish-born actress Ann-Margret has always been a major vasoconstrictor in New York, Hollywood and Vegas. Her sexual kindling point is low. She focuses like a heat-seeking missile locked onto her audience.

12. The sexiest eyes of the century, period. Sensuous as musk, Kim Basinger still walks more lightly than the rest of us. A film performer and a heroic animal-rights activist.

11. Of all American film actresses, only Rita Hayworth had her pin-up picture attached to a nuclear bomb, which was then dropped over Bikini Atoll. Did the earth move, sweetheart? Well, now that you mention it....

10. Jean Harlow was so over-the-top glamorous that she seemed at times grotesque. Harlow had, for starters, neon peroxide hair, plus a dimple, a beauty mark, a dynamic voice and the most explicitly sexy abdomen ever seen before or since.

9. Actress Bo Derek should have been ranked one tick lower to honor her role as the perfect woman in Blake Edwards' 10. Only a woman of spectacular visual clout could have made cornrows (with all those tiny, tiny braids) seem worth the effort.

8. Miss February 1990 and former Baywatch regular Pamela Anderson is as dramatic and lovely as a bursting star shell. "I love the dumb-blonde image," she says. "I have nothing to live up to. I can only surprise people."

7. The resemblance is eerie: Elizabeth Taylor sat for the bust of Queen Nefertiti. And the rest of Liz is so soft and warm on-screen that if dashboards were made of her, we would have no need for air bags.

6. You know the photo I'm referring to: Sophia Loren topless, wearing harem togs. Loren's mammary equipment was second breast to none, and she seemed happy about it. As though she had special implants--not silicone, not saline, but helium.

5. In any year, Cindy Crawford is the real Miss America. That a model, even one as multitalented as CC, should wind up between Loren and Bardot on a list of the century's sexiest women is a staggering tribute to her limpid and sweet-natured Americanness. The Statue of Liberty should have a beauty mark--right there.

4. French actress Brigitte Bardot served as a cultural weapon, revenge for American Coca-Cola diplomacy. Her pneumatique body was, pound for pound, the most perfect ever and the only irrefutable proof of God's existence.

3. Raquel Welch may not be the sexiest woman of the century--but she is close. No one has ever questioned the primacy of that magnificent frame. Through an admirable, interesting career she has accorded us all both decency and charm.

2. Marilyn, we knew, was the original and Jayne Mansfield the Xerox copy. And yet Jayne was real, too--those pneumothoraxic dolphin squeals that issued from her sinuses had an originality to them. The question is: Had Marilyn not been born, would Jayne now be number one by default? Or would Jayne not be on the list at all?

1. Marilyn Monroe was not just the sexiest woman of our century, a brilliant siren that men might fantasize about: We know now that her body was the actual nexus of American male power, a mystic chalice that heroes came not to drink from but to fill.

Everything about her has an uptilt: cheeks, mouth, breasts, pelvis, all sort of sexily slung.