Memories of Bob Guccione, Vanessa Williams, Traci Lords — and Me
Through a looking glass with the underdogs
When you work for publishers, you work for characters, larger than life. They may be risk-taking businessmen, but they are extravagant eccentrics. Bohemians. People who’ve turned life into a banquet, as Auntie Mame would say.
I think of some of my mentors: the late Sonny Mehta at Knopf. Don Katz at Audible. Si Newhouse at Condé Naste. I had one British publisher who made me negotiate with his Vatican papal representative. A big-league romance publisher insisted I drape a six foot boa constrictor around my neck and arms. (“She’s really getting too big for one person to carry.”).
Another publisher who shall remain un-named— although perhaps too easy to guess— announced it was a condition of my employment that I accompany them to a Red Sox game and take Ayahuasca.
But one beat them all. Really beat them all. —The late, but not forgotten, Bob Guccione.
Guccione was the creator of “Penthouse,” but he made a fortune in other genre periodicals, and ran a staff of hundreds out of his New York office. Despite his death and the “end of the empire,” his umbrella organization, General Media, is still cashing checks and sorting rights issues today.
Guccione was the first to grant me a monthly paycheck for my writing. I quit my day job and never looked back.
I wrote the first feminist erotic film column (and that's an understatement) at Penthouse Forum in the late 80s when their magazine conglomarate was flourishing. My column was called "The Erotic Screen."
Many of the editors and writers you’re familiar with at other major American magazines once worked for Guccione. Within the industry, it wasn’t scandalous. You could move from Penthouse to People or The New Yorker, or Readers Digest. and Many did. The skills and market were one.
A couple insights:
The classic photo layout for fashion and cheesecake that you see in every modern periodical, was a Penthouse innovation. You open a magazine and see a photo bleeding 2/3 on the left, a column of white, and then two photos, also full bleeds on the right— that's the "Penthouse Layout."
It’s an emphasis on white space- very clean, little or no type, bleeding the photos out on the edges. Those bleeds were innovative at the time.
The layout influenced all the fashion mags, every men's magazine, even if they were showing off stereos or cars.
It was different from Playboy's old layout, which had the traditional, Esquire-type design, the kind of thing you see on "Mad Men."
What About The Mob?
Everyone asks me about "organized crime" and its relationship to Guccione.
I laugh! —Not because the connection isn't true, but because the entire magazine distribution business, like the old record and jukebox business, is based on trucking, and what gets stocked and delivered.
That’s where the "organized crime" comes in. The foundation is the transportation and protection/extortion rackets on retailers.
I published an independent women's sex mag (On Our Backs) in the late 80s, and we had a hell of time breaking INTO the magazine distribution world, because of this time-honored corruption. The bigwigs didn’t give a hoot about your content as long as you pay them off.
The FBI, meanwhile, was perpetually chasing the porn businessmen AND the Teamsters union, the distribution channels, because of the unreported income involved. They had their “moral outrage,” sure, but follow the money. Think of all those quarters in peepshow machines! It reminds me of the Brink trucks used nowadays to move cannabis dollars. Without legal banking services, you need a way to move it.
The FBI used the RICO statutes of the day, leveraging "sex crimes" to investigate the money trail.
The “morality” involved was irrelevant. The guys who run the sex magazine businesses were old-school male chauvinists who would never want their daughter to be involved in either trucking or porn. They always told me, “Be a nice girl, go home!"
Lesbian-made sex zines? It blew their circuits.
How Canada Broke Our Backs
Forum was a huge break for me at the time— it was the beginning of my career as a fulltime writer. It subsidized my "spare time" to edit On Our Backs.
I had creative freedom at Forum, which is amazing to look back at. I got expertly copyedited and that was that. Good times. I had superb editors, like Liz McKenna, Lavada Nahon, and Jack Heidenry.
The one time we were “censored,” was a biggie. The MacKinnon-Dworkin legislation was passed into Canadian Customs controls. The so-called “Butler Statute” forbade a remarkable list of things we couldn't print anymore, such as the words "anal.” You couldn’t even write, “He’s being anal about doing the dishes.”
Also forbidden, and equally bizarre: Any arguing between men and women, any quarrel, could be could defined in the Canadian Customs Butler statute as "degrading to women.”
That’s a problem if you want to write dramatic or comic literature.
All S/M argot was banned, even the silliest euphemisms.
Finally, the “appearance” of age in text, was an issue. Not just photos! You had to make sure every character in your writing, even in fantasy, was at least a "Junior" in college. Oh, those were the days!
Penthouse was not about to fund two versions of their English language zines, for Canada and US. So one edition obeyed all the nonsense.
I bet you can guess what happened: the Canadian customs rules were only enforced against publications with an erotic or queer stigma. The New York Times, and McCalls could print the word "bondage" all day if they wanted to. They did.
As maddening as it was, The Butler statute took a far greater toll on small lesbian and gay presses than it did on Penthouse. It was financial ruin. Many went out of business. I remember smuggling On Our Backs in the back of a car to Vancouver's "Little Sisters" queer bookshop.
The Vanessa Williams and Traci Lords Story
I was writing for Forum when the centerfold of Vanessa William's appearance in Penthouse landed in 1984. She had won the Miss America contest, and a photographer from her past— who’d shot a conventionally pretty "girl-girl" pictorial00 sold his photos to PH, which in turn caused “Miss America” to take back their crown from Williams. Quelle Scandale.
But the public rooted for her! People were sick pageants and their pretensions. I was happy that Vanessa triumphed and became famous in music, theater and film, bigger than any pageant winner by far. It was a turning point in women turning the tables on slut-shaming.
I remember framing one of the best photos from this centerfold, where Vanessa is wearing a very "Scorpio Rising-era" gay leather dildo harness, looking as glamorous and poised as we always think of her. At even that age, she was unshakeable.
Funny about that spread. Penthouse to print ANOTHER centerfold on the opposite side of Vanessa William’s photo. Guess who it was? Traci Lords! It's a terrible pic of her, like a last minute pick. She’s a great beauty herself.
PH’s editors included a photograph of a yet-unknown erotic actress, because they were afraid to "merely" offer a black woman as a centerforld... what idiots. That was the kind of racist decision that was made all the time, at the top level. (Again, see fashion magazines, et al. They were even worse).
Later, this special edition was pulled from retailers, not because of Vanessa Williams, but because the “other unknown model,” Lords, was proved to be underage at the time of the shoot.
Traci made it in Hollywood too — Roger Corman and John Waters cast her, and her natural charisma, chops, and resilience broke the critics’ backs, just like Vanessa.
How intriguing those two, printed back to back, had such remarkable heroines’ journeys. I look back on those years now— women were kicking ass in pop culture in ways that exhilarated us. Penthouse Forum had hired 4 women contributing editors: myself, Annie Sprinkle, and Veronica Vera among them. That kind of thing doesn’t happen often. I’m so glad it was my first banquet.
Oh, I remember that issue! Summer 1984! I was working at a very horrible day job in Daly City and I saw that cover at a convenience store called Circle A market. Anarchy! I had to start scheming how I could get alone with that Penthouse. Miss Live-In (a woman of the gay persuasion herself now, for most of the last 40 years) had views about pornography. So I hid it in a brown paper bag at my Desk of Sorrows
Fortunately, one of the benefits of my horrible job was a pass so we could play tedious squash with one another. And the squash court had private hot tubs with doors you could lock. And that’s all I’m going to say about that. Except when I think of those photos of the flawless Vanessa, I hear the gurgle of a hot tub simmering away.
Dear Susie, when you were writing for Penthouse Forum did you know John Liscio? He wrote for the Forum around 1979-81. John had a dual life. During the day he was the New York correspondent for BNA publications, which was a very serious legal and regulatory news organization. I wrote for BNA from '72-2007. At night, he wrote for the Forum. John would regale us with stories about attending gala openings for porn films. He eventually quit saying ``there are only so many ways to write about dildos.'' He later became a highly regarded financial reporter who did a newsletter on the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which did not involve dildos as far as I know. regards Mitchell Tropin