Playmates in Space: the girls of Apollo 12

Pete Conrad on the Moon November 19th 1969

It is fifty years ago today that astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth men to walk on the Moon. The entire crew of three had a US Navy background but their backup crew, David Scott, Alfred Worden and James Irwin, were all US Air Force (they would later form the Apollo 16 crew). As a typical inter-service prank the back-up crew managed to insert photocopies of pictures of Playboy Playmates into the astronauts’ lunar checklist (see ringed, above), which the back-up crew had to prepare for the mission astronauts. These were a schedule of tasks to be performed on the moonwalks in a three and half inch by three and a half inch ring-bound booklet which were attached to the left wrists of their spacesuits. The astronauts didn’t discover the inserted pictures until actually on the moonwalks, as the check lists were not used in training. Each astronaut had two pictures inserted into their checklists.

Conrad: Angela Dorian

Pete Conrad’s contained, firstly, a picture of Angela Dorian, Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967. The caption to the picture in the checklist read ‘Seen any interesting hills & valleys?’ 

Angela Dorian: original photo

Angela Dorian was born Victoria Vettri in New York to Italian immigrant parents. She was already an actress on TV and film, including Yul Brynner Mayan epic Kings of the Sun (1963), when she posed for Playboy, at the age of twenty-two. She lost out on the lead role in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). She followed up her 1967 appearance in Playboy by becoming the Playmate of the Year for 1968.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Best known for her subsequent roles in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and, especially, the Hammer prehistoric adventure When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), her career petered out in the early seventies; her last film being the far from epic Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

In court in 2011

 In 2011, after having shot her husband in the back at close range (he survived), during an argument, she was charged with attempted voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to nine years in prison. She was  released last year.

Conrad: Reagan Wilson

The second Playmate in Conrad's check list was Reagan Wilson, Miss October 1967, captioned ‘Preferred tether partner’; referring to a procedure for shared life support in an emergency. 

Reagan Wilson: original photo 

Californian Wilson was twenty when she posed for Playboy and had also done a little bit of TV acting. She made two films in the early seventies, both heavily featuring her 40 inch bust, before getting married and opening an antique shop with her husband.

Alan Bean’s first checklist picture was Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968, with a caption ‘Don’t forget – describe the protuberances’.

Myers was from Ohio, had just graduated from high school and was still only seventeen when she posed for Playboy.  Like all the images used for the checklists the picture came from the 1970 Playboy calendar which had just gone on sale.  Paid $5,000 for her shoot she was voted the 10th greatest Playmate of all time in 2000. For two reasons.

Cynthia's distinctive silhouette in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

She had an uncredited role as a native girl in the Hammer film The Lost Continent (1968) but her biggest role came in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) alongside another Playboy Playmate, Dolly Read. She died from lung cancer in 2011 at the age of sixty-one.

Bean: Leslie Bianchini

Bean's second checklist Playmate was Leslie Bianchini, Miss January 1969, with a caption of  ‘Survey-her activity’ a pun on the Surveyor 3 unmanned lander, which the mission was due to inspect on the surface of the Moon.

Leslie Bianchini: original photo

Leslie Bianchini was the daughter of an Illinois turkey farmer but the family moved to San Francisco and Playboy magazine found her conveniently working as a Bunny girl at the Playboy Club in that city. Twenty-one when her pictorial was shot she was a keen horsewoman and she later became a breeder of Arabian horses.

Gordon: DeDeLind

Dick Gordon, orbiting the Moon in the command module was not left out, either, and had the November 1969 page (in colour rather than a small photocopy) of that year’s Playboy calendar (rather than a picture from the 1970 edition as Conrad and Bean had) in his locker (above), which he discovered while the others were on the Moon. His Playmate was DeDe Lind who posed in August 1967, at the age of twenty. Miss Lind was so mature for her age that she was spotted by a photographer at a Californian swimming pool at the age of fourteen and started her modelling career then. Her Playboy centrefold received more fan mail than any other in the magazine’s history. Nearly thirty years after her centrefold she posed naked again for Playboy at the age of forty nine. In 2011 Dick Gordon sold the Calendar page at auction for $21,000.

In the image at the top of the page you can just make out the checklist on Pete Conrad's left arm displaying the picture of Reagan Wilson.

Happy Hallowe'en: Riding High by Gil Elvgren

 Riding High (1958)

The celebration of All Hallows Eve in the UK has increased enormously over the last decade; driven mainly by manufacturers of plastic tat, supermarkets and confectioners, hoping for a pre-Christmas sales bump.   When I was a child it was not marked at all in Britain.  Indeed, I remember being invited to a Hallowe'en party in Banff in Canda in 1994 and finding it a very odd idea.  After all, we have Guy Fawkes night in the UK, just five days later, which is much better as you get to let off rockets.  Sadly, the latter is falling out of fashion in the UK, due to health and safety concerns over the public letting off large amounts of explosives willy nilly (alright, I know that gunpowder is not technically an explosive) and politically correct notions that, for some reason, the burning of effigies of Catholics is not acceptable.

This painting was by America''s greatest pin-up artist, Gil Elvgren (1914-1980), who for more than forty years produced hundreds of paintings of pretty girls (usually having difficulties in keeping their clothing in order) for calendars and advertisements (especially for Coca-Cola).   He was also a fine photographer and shot his own reference pictures, as here.

Elvgren's model for this painting was, the really rather splendid, Marilyn Hanold  (b. 1938) who was Playboy's Playmate of the Month for June 1959.  She was just nineteen when she posed for this shot.  She had a number of small  parts (actually there was nothing small about her parts) in TV and films in the fifties and early sixties, including, at the end of her career, as Amazon number 8, in the James Bond spoof In Like Flint (1967) with James Coburn.  That year, however, she married Rulon Neilson, the president of Skyline Oil Company from Utah and stopped acting.  What did she see in the, twice her age, millionaire oil tycoon?  For, that matter what did the 57 year old see in the 29 year old 40-26-38 nude model and former Las Vegas showgirl?

It's a mystery!

Something for the Weekend: Joey Gibson

Well formed mounds are vital for sandcastle building

Here is Playboy Playmate of the Month for June 1967, Joey Gibson, having fun with her sandcastle and soldiers on the beach.  This is the only Playboy Centrefold which contains model soldiers so should be revered.  There is nothing like going to the beach and building sandcastles.  Or at least there wasn't when the Legatus was small.  Provided, of course, that you had enough soldiers to take down to the beach with you.  I had a rather random collection of Britains Herald Trojans and Greeks (which were my favourites, despite having the bendiest spears in existence) and Cowboys and Red Indians (that's Native Americans to you young people).  I had some WW2 Germans (all with soft caps, oddly) of unknown provenance. I also had some Timpo American Civil War figures which I liked as you could take them to pieces and put them back together again.  

Two hundred foot woman attacks castle

What I never had, and what would have been perfect for the increasingly ornate sandcastles I built on the beach at West Wittering, Sussex, were any knights in armour.  So I would have been very envious of Miss Gibson's splendid high medieval knights.  My father, who hated the beach, and who joined the Playboy Club when it opened in London in 1966, would have been more impressed with Miss Gibson, I suspect.  

As Joey knows, flags always give a sandcastle that certain je ne sais quoi and at windy Wittering they would flap about like mad. You used to be able to buy packs of paper flags with wooden sticks in the funny little beach shop there.  I seem to recall that they consisted of flags of the UK: Scotland Wales England and such, with other random ones like red flags with yellow lions on. Hard to remember 45 years later!  Better than Miss Gibson's flag anyway.

Joey's pictures were taken by Peter Gowland, top photographer and bit part actor (he even appeared in Citizen Kane). She was 39-25-36 at the time, in case you were wondering.

Unfortunately, one month after her Playboy issue came out Joey (who gave her name to police as Nancy Cole) was arrested for prostitution in Santa Monica where she was found in a room with a man and another woman.  She denied the charges but was found guilty of soliciting.  Should have stuck to playing soldiers on the beach.  Probably trying to make some money so she could invest in a catapult.