The Spirit of Ellen Stohl : Paralysis Doesn’t Impair Her Fight for Human, Sexual Rights of Disabled--or Keep Her From Posing for Playboy Layout

Ellen Stohl hasn’t looked much lately at July’s issue of Playboy magazine, the one with the eight-page “Meet Ellen Stohl” pictorial. When she does, she laughs a little at the landmark photos of a slightly younger, maybe more naive Ellen draped only in lace and pearls--images that turned the Cal State Fullerton student into a celebrity and provoked fear, worry and a national debate.

Flipping through the pictures, she pointed out her favorite. It is the one where she is lying down, looking back over her sweatered shoulder, bare derriere and thigh. She likes it because her body seems to be nearly perfect.

Stohl’s real contours are not perfect. In 1983, an auto accident broke her neck, crushed her spinal cord and paralyzed her legs, which have become “two times smaller and 10 times not as firm.” Related surgeries scarred her buttocks and, for a time, robbed her of her will to live.

She has told the next part of her story dozens of times to reporters and talk-show hosts who wanted to know why she would take off her clothes for Playboy.

Stohl, a theater student who had been a semifinalist in the Miss Anaheim contest in 1982, told them that as she regained her will and her ability to move in a wheelchair, she found other people reacting to her as a child.

“Sexuality is the hardest thing to hold onto” after becoming disabled, she told Playboy in a letter asking to be a model. “This is not to say that (the disabled) are not capable but rather that society’s emphasis on perfection puts a definite damper on self-esteem.” Leaders of groups for the disabled have unanimously agreed.

She wanted to be photographed nude to prove that she is neither a child nor an androgyne, that she is in fact sexual and desirable. She picked Playboy, she told one TV audience, because “they focus on the ideal image of a woman. If I can achieve that, I can be anything in between.”

Any other magazine would have published a cliched “triumph-over-tragedy” story, and she would have been quickly forgotten, she said recently, sitting in her wheelchair at the kitchen table of her Placentia apartment, surrounded by posters and old photos of Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo.

Posing nude for Playboy would make people remember her as a woman, she said.

Specifically, she said she hoped to change the minds of potential employers who weren’t willing to hire her as an actress or model. Indirectly, she wanted to make a statement for the rights of the disabled.

Eight months later, friends said, Stohl has become more confident. But whether she achieved her goals in posing for Playboy remains uncertain.

Stohl is 5 feet, 7 inches tall, weighs 105 pounds and measures 35 1/2-24-35. A Playboy documentary video on Stohl tells viewers that she is “smart, sexy, spunky and inspiring.” The video’s producer said Stohl has a face “the camera loves.”

She said she knows that she is not a beauty, so if the photos make her look glamorous and sexy, she said it is because she knows and feels good about herself.

A high-speed talker, she exudes a healthy, street-wise aura, periodically twisting her torso and stretching her arms to exercise them. Yet after a time, she will admit to a nameless vulnerability, more profound than nakedness.

Raised in Portland, Ore., with five siblings by a single mother, Stohl described herself as a “geeky” teen-ager with cotton-candy hair, who got good grades without having to study hard. She always wanted to be homecoming queen because she knew she never would be.

Instead she studied acting and dreamed of Hollywood’s glamour queens. When she was in junior high, she moved to Southern California with her family and visited Hollywood. She saw grit, not glamour, on Hollywood Boulevard and recalled crying over her destroyed illusions.

By the time she enrolled at Cal State Fullerton in 1982, she had learned that “part of being a woman is knowing when not to be a lady.” She pledged Zeta Tau Alpha sorority but said her sisters thought her dresses were too tight and low cut, her language too rough. She said she was kicked out for “unladylike” behavior.

She had never had a steady boyfriend but was one of the guys, playing pool, drinking shots of tequila alongside them, she said.

morning of Jan. 19, 1983, she left a party alone, driving her stepfather’s Chevrolet van. She said she remembers nothing of that evening. Apparently, she was rounding the curve connecting the southbound Orange Freeway with the westbound Riverside Freeway when the van spun off the ramp and crashed.

She was not wearing a seat belt and was thrown out of the van where, she said, the windshield had popped out.

Stohl is suing General Motors for about $5 million for faulty construction of the windshield, said her attorney, Stephen Jacques of Los Angeles. The case is scheduled for trial in federal court in May.

Court records indicate that Stohl’s blood alcohol level was over the legal maximum, but she denied that she was drunk. “I never drank and drove. . . . I wouldn’t do it.”

At trial, Jacques said, “we’re not going to advertise the fact she appeared in Playboy. . . . I don’t think a person can make a career out of posing for Playboy.”

Eugene Grace, the attorney for General Motors, said if he introduces the Playboy photos, it would be only to rebut arguments that her injury has made her a recluse. “Some people say their whole life has gone sour, can’t function, don’t date. This, in her words, is quite to the contrary.”

If Stohl eventually turned a classic lemon into lemonade, it was still, in her words, “a horrible change of life.”

Her neck was broken in five places, her wrist and both collarbones were broken. “Half of my head was smashed,” she said. “It felt like a rotten apple.”

At first she was paralyzed from the neck down. But because her spinal cord was crushed, not severed, she gradually regained feeling in her upper body, arms and parts of her torso. Even so, her body became something for doctors and nurses to turn, poke, cut apart and sew up.

After several weeks in the hospital, she developed a bed sore that threatened her tail bone and required two operations to repair, she said.

When Stohl had been reduced to 89 pounds and nurses began to have trouble finding a vein through which to feed her, defiance joined defeat.

“I said, don’t touch me. . . . I was going into shock. I didn’t care. I said, ‘I just want to die. I can’t fight anymore.’ ”

The only reason she didn’t die is that her mother asked her not to, she said: “(Mother) said, ‘Please. For me. Try one more time. Please.’ She was crying. She said, ‘If you do this, I’ll give you my diamond wedding band.’ I did it. “

Later, during four long, dependent months of rehabilitation, she said she resented her decision because she made it for the wrong reason. “I did it because I owed it to her. Life was not worth living. I could have died back then and it would be over. I thought about suicide two or three times.”

Then she said she realized: “If I was in it, I needed to be in it for me.”

After becoming mobile in her wheelchair, learning to swim and finding out how to defend herself with karate, she moved out of her parents’ home and (with a sister) into her ground-floor, federally subsidized apartment in Placentia, then went back to school. It had been nearly a year since the accident.

“If I had not let her go, I would have crippled her more,” said her mother, Carrie Rudd, who moved about a year after the accident to Washington with her husband, Stohl’s stepfather, Jack

“It’s one reason I moved up here,” Rudd said. “I think I ran away so I wouldn’t smother her.”

Stohl’s apartment had a roll-in shower, a raised toilet, curtained spaces under sinks for her chair. Her roommates (she lives now with another sister) did the main shopping, and a federally subsidized worker cleaned her home.

Her legs had regained “touch sensation,” but it took her years to achieve bowel and bladder control, “a sore subject in certain company,” her mother said. She learned that she doesn’t perspire and can’t take the heat.

In her wheelchair, Stohl found that she could do everything she used to except that it was “10 times longer and 12 times harder.” Getting in and out of her car was equal to getting dressed and undressed twice.

Using her chair for mobility, she went back to school, changing her theater major to communications, back to parties, out to bars.

She joined the Performing Arts for the Handicapped, a Carlsbad-based group that trains disabled actors for mainstream theater. Through a promotional modeling agency, she put together a modeling portfolio. Then she started “hitting the pavement like everybody else.”

After auditions, she said directors basically responded with, “We’ll keep you on file for disabled roles.”

She told modeling agencies that she did not have to stay in her wheelchair, that she was “like a poseable Barbie doll,” but no one hired her.

In October, 1986, she performed in “Wheels,” an L.A. Chamber Ballet work that integrated disabled performers in wheelchairs and able-bodied dancers, but wound up, according to Times reviewer Lewis Segal “reinforcing the worst cliches about the handicapped.”

When she decided to write to Playboy, the idea frightened a lot of people besides her mother, who never thought that her daughter would appear in a soft-core, sexually implicit, if not exactly explicit, sort of magazine.

Stohl herself was afraid people might laugh at her scars, her flabby muscles, her cellulite.

Some Cal State Fullerton officials worried that they would be linked by association with Playboy and that patrons might stop giving to the university.

At the Playboy mansion later, Hugh Hefner told Ellen that the idea had made him nervous too, she said. “But he said the issue (of disabled rights) was important enough to take the risk,” Stohl said. Editors at the magazine feared that critics would have a field day, accusing Playboy of exploitation of the disabled as a fetish object. (“Why stir the buzzards up?” one editor asked.)

As it turned out, their fears of public outcry, as well as hopes of increased sales, didn’t materialize. “This feature probably didn’t sell one extra magazine,” said Kate Nolan, an associate editor of the Chicago-based magazine.

The photographers shot seminude pictures of Stohl in a boudoir setting, avoiding nude shots in a wheelchair because it would be “inappropriate,” said Gary Cole, Playboy’s photography director. Just three small pictures showed her in her chair.

Stohl met the magazine’s standards for a pretty face, he said adding: “No one has a perfect body.”

Since Stohl appeared in the magazine, dozens of disabled women, or women with mastectomies or terminal illnesses, have contacted Playboy, asking to be one of the 36 women featured each year in the magazine. Such problems would not automatically disqualify a candidate, but none met the magazine criteria, he said.

“There was something unique in Ellen’s personality. . . . The same thing could hold true for a woman with another kind of disability. Maybe someone blind. It’s possible.”

Ellen’s mother said: “I came to find Playboy was as concerned about Ellen as anybody else. She was chaperoned. They treated her very warmly and with a lot of respect. . . . She gets transportation if it’s a problem.”

When Stohl went to Australia last July to visit a boyfriend, Playboy put her on the payroll as an intern at the Australia Playboy magazine. The magazine also helped her find an apartment there and she is scheduled to work as an assistant at the Playboy Jazz Festival this year.

Meanwhile, her pictures elicited the most response of any topic among readers of the Disability Rag, a 6,000-subscriber magazine that covers disability rights in the United States, Editor Mary Johnson said. Eight months later, letters are still arriving.

“Is it a step forward or a step back?” Johnson asked. “Are we going forward to be sex objects? We don’t know. It’s a troubling issue.”

A package in its September/October issue called “What Has Ellen Done?” included two essays, a noncommittal editorial, nine letters and a poll on whether Stohl had furthered or hindered equal rights for the disabled.

Sociologist Irving K. Zola, who edits Disability Studies Quarterly, wrote that Playboy “reinforced precisely what Stohl has complained about: ‘society’s emphasis on perfection.’ They’ve satisfied their own demand that Stohl look like everyone else by creating the illusion that she does.”

Zola, a Brandeis University professor, contended that Playboy--in its zeal to promote equal rights--should have photographed her nude in a wheelchair. Some disabled people have made banners proclaiming “Doing it in a wheelchair is fun,” he said.

Moreover, he complained that Playboy’s photographs and accompanying text--including what Stohl said she had learned about lovemaking--leaves readers with the erroneous impression that paraplegics can move and respond like able-bodied people.

(“I’d assume people would know if you can’t get into a position, you need help,” Stohl said recently.”It’s too detailed for a general article.”)

Another sociologist, Caroline L. Kaufmann, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote to the Disability Rag: “Stohl wants to be regarded as a woman--and displaying herself as a sexual fetish is one form of confirmation. . . . Does her statement in Playboy invite men to exploit her sexuality and that of other disabled women--in an effort to see if it exists?”

Wrote Stephanie K. Thomas, a reader from Austin, Tex.: “Thanks a million, Ellen. Now we can quit all that boring stuff about loving relationships between partners who value each other for who--not what--they are.”

According to Stohl, who lectures in college courses at Cal State Fullerton about human sexuality, sex--for her as for anyone--is “a process, not an end result”--more about communication than intercourse.

For disabled people, sexuality is a “huge issue,” Editor Johnson said. But Stohl, she pointed out, is an exception:

“There are a lot who are isolated, some living in their parents back bedroom, at 33, never had a date. There’s a lot more like that than like Ellen Stohl. The idea of sexual behavior among severely disabled people is still just seen as unthinkable.”

Sexual exploitation is not yet an issue for the disabled, Johnson said. But: “That might become an issue if we ever get to be seen as sexual people in the first place.”

In the poll, 60% of the 45 respondents approved of women with disabilities posing for a magazine such as Playboy. Just 40% agreed that having a physically disabled woman pose in Playboy shows that people with disabilities are closer to equality.

Most reaction was favorable, Playboy editors and Stohl said.

“I think it’s great, though I would never do it myself,” said Karin Baumohl, 23, a senior computer science major at Cal State who also became disabled in a car accident five years ago.

“It’s so important for someone to break down that barrier for disabled individuals to be considered sexual beings. There’s so much ignorance in this world. People think if you’re in a wheelchair, you can’t have children, don’t have sex.”

Stohl said she received just a few negative letters (from people, she said, calling themselves “Christians” or salacious proposals, such as the one from a county attorney who wrote on letterhead stationery. All such letters are kept on file, she said, in the event of a possible attack.

If any exploiting took place, Stohl said it was she who used Playboy: “I did use Playboy to get my point across. I exploited Playboy’s epitome of a beautiful woman to prove I can be all that in fact I’m not (perceived to be).”

For her, the Playboy article was “the beginning of an ad campaign for me.”

She has sold her life story (for “a couple thousand”) to Fries Entertainment, a Los Angeles production company; is negotiating with William Morris Agency to publish a biography; is about to film an exercise video targeted for the disabled; has designed a line of skin-care sheepskin products for the disabled and endorses in her talks and conversation a portable, 25-pound wheelchair in exchange for her own free use of one.

Stohl said, “This has taken me into the range of being a personality. . . . It gives me commercial value,” which she wants to leverage into solid roles in movies, dramas, sitcoms or on the stage.

She has also developed a pas de deux ballet, “Flying Without Wings” and is writing Mikhail Baryshnikov in hope that he will produce and dance with her in it.

She also serves on the boards of the Performing Arts for the Handicapped, the local chapter of the American Paralysis Assn. and the Petrovsky Assn., a nonprofit group that raises funds for research in spinal-cord injuries.

But casting directors still view her differently, she said: “There are too many other gorgeous, sexy blondes out there walking. Why put somebody in there in a wheelchair. All society wants a reason for a person (playing a role) in a wheelchair. If there’s no reason, why put them in there?”

The Ellen of today is “more cynical” than the young woman who posed for Playboy, she said, closing the magazine. “Prince Charming doesn’t come along, and ‘happily ever after’ isn’t the ending to every story.”

Friendly and flirtatious, she has met men on the freeway, on airplanes, at school, in bars. Her saucer eyes (“glacier blue” on her resume) are one of her best assets, and she knows how to use them to inspire a man to come across a room to sit by her side at a party.

She knows she is interested romantically if her toes tingle, she said. She finds it “funny” that more men are interested in her than she is in them.

Two of her romances blossomed into love, lasting three to eight months.

“It’s a problem for her to get close to anybody,” her mother said. “It’s amazing. After the injury, some close friends that couldn’t handle it just drifted away.

“In a relationship it’s a problem. . . . It can be superficial and fun, but when they get close and they realize how much work it is, and not something that will go away . . . it stops relationships from lasting.

“I tell her the right man will come along. Every single woman has the same problem.”

The biggest problem in dating is her lack of spontaneity, she said. Sometimes dates have to carry her into the bathroom, if there are no facilities for the handicapped. One date recently wanted to grab a bottle of wine and have a fire on the beach, she said. But because that would take too much planning, they decided it was “not worth the hassle,” she said.

They ended up sitting on a mountaintop, looking at the city lights.

“I’ve had relationships end without explanation,” she said. “It’s happened a number of times. I wonder, ‘Is it me? Is it the situation?’

“I’m sure (the disability) has made a difference to some men. I’ve even tried to ask, but they don’t confront it too much.”

She would like to marry some day and have children. She believes in the possibility that she’ll walk again.

Researchers the past few years have made progress in purifying molecules that cause spinal cord growth, have produced spinal cord growth by transplanting fetal tissue into spinal cords of rats and have successfully tested THA, a drug that has made intact nerves functional again, in Alzheimer’s patients.

“Never before have there been so many promising leads out there,” said Bob Yant, a quadriplegic and president of the county chapter of the American Paralysis Assn.

Some days, Stohl wakes up “absolutely positive” that she’ll walk again.

“But that’s five years from now,” she said. “Life is what you make it today.”

Rolling across the Cal State Fullerton campus on a recent morning, Stohl pointed out a young man she would like to date.

“It’s spring,” she said. “I can look.”