Why Famous Women Pose for Centerfolds

Fawn Hall and Donna Rice didn’t. Paula Parkinson, Jessica Hahn, Rita Jenrette and Debra Murphree did.

Getting scandal-entangled women to bare all is a major coup for men’s magazines, which pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to titillate.

Besides dangling six-figure fees, such magazines as Playboy and Penthouse wine and dine these formerly obscure women and offer the promise of nationwide publicity. The reason is simple: Scandal sells.

“Women, or even men who are at the center of a storm, of any kind, are always best sellers,” said Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione.

Rush to Resurrect Features

When Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle was chosen as the Republican vice presidential candidate, Penthouse and Playboy rushed to resurrect features on Paula Parkinson, the comely blond lobbyist who accompanied Quayle and two other politicians on a golf outing eight years ago.

Playboy’s November issue includes new comments from Parkinson, claiming that Quayle propositioned her on the Florida weekend, and a nude photograph of her taken in 1980.

Penthouse’s story, also for November, includes fresh remarks from a 1981 interview about an alleged dalliance with Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), as well as statements about Quayle.

“The idea behind this is to get somebody who’s in the public eye . . . and show something about that person that you can’t find anyplace else,” said Nat Lehrman, a former Playboy publishing executive and now chairman of Columbia College’s journalism school here.

Jessica Hahn, the former church secretary whose sexual encounter with Jim Bakker led to the PTL evangelist’s downfall last year, got her second Playboy feature in the September issue.

She first appeared in the November, 1987, issue, featuring several nude photographs and her version of what happened with Bakker. The issue sold more than 5 million copies at newsstands, about 1.5 million more than usual.

Hahn contends that Penthouse offered her $12 million to appear. She chose instead to tell her story to Playboy for a rumored $1 million.

“Playboy approached me and Penthouse (too) pretty much when the story broke,” Hahn, 29, said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, Ariz., where she’s working in radio.

Penthouse, she said, “was making a lot of promises that they could not keep. The money was endless. I mean it was ridiculous.”

The First Move

Playboy contends that Hahn and an agent first approached the magazine, which Hahn denies. Regardless of who made the first move, Playboy acknowledges she was a big catch.

Penthouse struck it rich with its July issue, featuring the woman at the center of the scandal involving televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. The magazine includes explicit photos of Debra Murphree showing the things she says Swaggart asked her to do in a motel room.

The Murphree issue sold out in five days, selling more than 4 million copies, double the normal newsstand sales, according to Penthouse officials.

Guccione and an attorney for Murphree declined to reveal how much she was paid, but it was rumored to be $75,000 to $100,000.

Murphree, jailed in Louisiana on an unrelated prostitution charge, was not available for comment.

But capitalizing on scandals can be tricky for magazines, said Nancie S. Martin, editor in chief of Playgirl magazine. “You have to get to people at the right time. You have to pay them a lot of money. You have to hope it’s still a scandal when the magazine comes out.”

Often, posing nude is a way for women linked to scandal to create or advance careers, Martin said. But why would someone like Rita Jenrette, ex-wife of former South Carolina Rep. John Jenrette, want to bare her body to millions?

“I thought it would be a hoot, a funny thing to do,” said Jenrette, 38, who appeared in Playboy in April, 1981, after her husband’s bribery and conspiracy conviction in the FBI Abscam investigation.

“People caught in the midst of turmoil, you do a lot of uncharacteristic things,” said Jenrette, now living in New York and pursuing an acting career. “I never anticipated the criticism.”

As far as men’s magazines making money off the scandal, she said, “What else is there? It sells. . . . The sensational grabs people.”

That’s why Playboy and Penthouse, offering six-figure payoffs, hotly pursued Donna Rice, whose relationship with former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart doomed his presidential hopes, and Fawn Hall, the National Security Council secretary who helped Oliver North shred and alter documents about arms deals in the Iran-Contra scandal.

“Donna Rice I think we were close to making a deal with at one point,” Playboy’s Cohen said. “Nudity was discussed. She just walked away from it. There were several conversations with her, lunches . . . but no deal was made. . . .

“Fawn Hall . . . would have certainly been a cover (story), would have sold well,” Cohen said.

Playboy would not disclose their offers, but Guccione said Penthouse offered Rice about $350,000 and Hall $250,000.

Hall’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, said “the money did not tempt her. She’s too much of a lady . . . and she’s not going to try to capitalize in any unseemly way.”

Rice could not be reached and her Miami attorney, Thomas McAliley, was vacationing and unavailable to explain why she rejected the offers.