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.

Mariam Agredano at the Giro d'Italia 2019

It's not just the podium girls at the Giro; many of the sponsors employ young ladies to promote their products too, at the start or finish. Very visible this year has been Argentinian model Mariam Agredano (left, above).  She has been working for the curiously titled Named Sport, who are an Italian sports nutrition company, one of the Giro's main sponsors.

Arguably, of all the Grand Tours, the Giro has the loveliest girls and, unlike the Tour or the Vuelta, has had no serious criticism of it employing these ladies.

After all, these ladies have rights too and what is a world class beauty like Señorita Agredano going to do if she can't look sullenly gorgeous at a cycle race. Model lingerie?

There is no such thing as perfection, of course, but if I had to design my visually perfect lady (like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall (1990), perhaps) then I would venture that she would be very close to the lovely Mariam.  As one of my friends observed in the past: "He does like them dark and obvious".

She is so world class that she made the cover of the summer issue of Australian Penthouse for January/February 2017. 

Now I do not like things coming from the Argentine, on the whole, as their government owes me about  $75,000 in unpaid fees which I know I will never get. "Forget it, you are British," my not very helpful Argentinian lawyer told me. I do not buy Argentinian wine, therefore, but I am prepared to make an exception for Mariam.

Fortunately, this is my adults only blog (although why naked ladies should be confined to adults (theoretically), by the puritans in American internet companies, I don't know, as I am certain teenage boys (and no doubt some teenage girls ) would enjoy them too.

We can, therefore, present these other fine studies of Señorita Agredano, from her Penthouse pictorial,  which were taken in Spain, where she now lives.

Lovely photography by Spanish fashion and beauty photographer Edu Gómez,

Barbara Steele for Playmen: September 1967

The fourth issue of Playmen appeared in September 1967 and contained a pictorial on actress Barbara Steele. Born in Birkenhead she studied at the Chelsea Art School, as she planned to become a painter, and then the Sorbonne in Paris.

Although she had a few small parts in British films at the end of the fifties she made her name in Italian horror films of the sixties, principally Black Sunday (1960), although she also appeared in Hollywood's The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and then a number of other cult Italian horror films,  She also had a part in Federico Fellini's 8½. (1963) and  Fellini wanted her to appear more in the film but she was contracted to another movie/

She carried on acting, sporadically, during the sixties and seventies,  becoming a cult star.  She took ten years off from acting but started to work as a producer, including working on two mini-series I remember watching, the Robert Mitchum WW2 dramas The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988); even winning an Emmy for the latter.  More production and acting roles followed, the last of which was in 2016.

Given Playmen had only just started showing nipples on its pages a month or so earlier, it was a bit of a leap to have Miss Steele flashing her fur in these shots. Presumably, the argument would have gone that she was, in fact, dressed.

In fact, many copies of this issue were seized by the police and Playmen didn’t risk any more pubic hair on its pages for nearly five years. Still, it beat both Playboy and Penthouse to the furry grail by some years.

Halloween witches by Angus McBride

Given it's Halloween today it seems like a good opportunity to post this cartoon by Angus McBride of a pair of witches discussing familiars.  The left hand witch obviously thinking that she would like to get familiar with the right hand witch's familiar.  As ever with McBride, bags of character in the faces.  It first appeared in Mayfair Magazine, Volume  8 Number 10 (October 1973).

Molly Peters 1942-2017

Like many people in Britain in the sixties and seventies, the only time my family went to the cinema in a year was when the annual (as they then were) James Bond film was released.  I remember a few others that actually got me to the cinema.  I remember going to Carry on Cowboy (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), One Million Years BC (1966), Thunderbird 6 (1968) (I missed Thunderbirds are Go (1966), which we were due to go to but I was dangerously ill in hospital - as my sister says: 'when you were small you were always basically just on the brink of death' - to which there is some truth), The Jungle Book (1967), The Battle of Britain (1969) and Waterloo (1970).  Most of these films, as you can imagine, I was mainly taken too by my father but the Bond films were family outings.  Given the amount of implied sex and violence this is rather odd, in retrospect, and now I find it strange, when going to see a Bond at the cinema to see parents with children who are really too young to attend.  

Thunderball (1966) was, the last James Bond film I didn't see at the cinema.  You Only Live Twice (1967) was the first one, as I mentioned in my post on the Bond films of Roger Moore, recently.  My mother and father went to see Thunderball and I remember my mother telling me it was the best one so far (discuss).   So I never saw Molly Peters, who died this week, playing therapist Patricia Fearing on the big screen in Thunderball, although I would, no doubt, have been as immune to her charms as I was to Raquel Welch's in One Million Years BC.  

I had to wait a long time to see Thunderball as ITV didn't acquire the British TV rights (for £850,000) of the first six Bond films until 1974 and these were then first shown between 1975 and 1977.  By 1976, however, I was well aware of Miss Peters' charms when I first saw the (pan and scan) film on TV.

In fact, there was rather too much of Miss Peters' charms on display for the British Board of Film Censors who objected to no less than 32 items in Thunderball and indicated that if it wasn't cut it would be given an 'X' certificate,  The scene where Peters gets her naked back massaged by Connery using a mink glove was cut from the British theatrical release, although it was restored for the later video and DVD release.

What did remain, however, was the scene where, after rescuing Bond from a sabotaged back stretching machine, Bond pushes Peters' character into the Turkish bath (despite her saying 'no' -sorry, feminists) and strips her clothes off.  Miss Peters' naked back  is clearly visible through the steamed up window.  However mild it seems today, it was the first nude love scene in a Bond film. which was Peters' claim to cinematic immortality.

This pbotograph, which appeared in Playboy that year, suggests that Peters really was completely naked in the scene or, at least, was for this publicity still.

With director Peter Young on the set of Thunderball

Peters was a model when she appeared as an extra in The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965) and was spotted by the film's director, Terence Young, who would go on to direct Thunderball the following year.  He encouraged her to try out for the part of Patricia Fearing.

Being an experienced photographic model, the Bond producers were delighted to get Peters to pose for publicity stills wearing (just about) her shorts and blouse outfit from her first appearance in the health farm sequence.

I don't know if they make chest expanders any more but they seemed popular things in small ads in magazines and newspapers in the sixties.  Miss Peters seems to enjoy a good stretch, anyway.

The mink massage glove featured in a number of the press stills but the scene of Peters massaging Connery's back with it was cut from the film.

The glove appeared again in a couple of rather more revealing shots which were done for a Bond Girl special in November 1965's Playboy, which also featured an interview with Sean Connery.  Playboy had, for many years, a strong association with the Bond producers and this was the first of many pictorials of Bond girls which tied in to new Bond films.  It was the top photograph of these which appeared in the magazine.

Peters was a brunette and only dyed her hair blonde for the role in Thunderball, so any shots of her with blonde hair date after this.  Men's magazines were keen to exploit the Bond girl connection, needless to say.  Here she is in June 1967's Fiesta and on the cover of American magazine Modern Man for May 1966.

Although she was only 22 when Thunderball was made her career never took off and she only appeared in three more films, in 1966 and 1968, and a had a couple of TV appearances in 1967.

She later revealed that she had had a dispute with her manager who would not release her from her contract but wouldn't work actively on her behalf either.  By the time her contract expired she had been forgotten.  She later got married and lived in Suffolk where she had a son (who pre-deceased her) but suffered a mild stroke in 2011.

A farmers daughter from Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, Peters left home for London as a teenager and worked as a nanny and as a shop assistant.  Some of her friends suggested that her 37-24-37 figure would get her a job as a glamour model.

She soon picked up work in this field and her first appearance was in one of glamour photographer Harrison Marks' (indeed, he is credited with inventing the term 'glamour photography') magazines in late 1962, when she would have been twenty.

She also posed for photographer Russell Gay, who was the man behind Fiesta and Knave magazines.  She appeared under a number of different  names, including Carla Houseman, Wanda Wainwright and Joey Milbank.   She made a number of short nudist films for Harrison Marks too.

It was usually a requirement for nude models at the time to shave their pubic hair, as its appearance in magazines would have brought charges of obscenity in the early sixties. The rather anatomically frank presentation of her nether regions here would also have got the publishers into trouble so a little retouching would have been necessary on this one.

However, here is a fully thatched Peters in a series of shots that were taken between 1963 and 1964 but couldn't have appeared in the UK (Marks did produce material for the rather more relaxed Continent).

Nearly all men's magazines in Britain at this time (until Penthouse in 1965, anyway) were small digest sized black and white productions but Peters did have a few colour shoots done, some of which appeared across the Atlantic.

Splendid!