RISKING EXPOSURE : More Than 11,000 College Women Have Applied to Appear in Playboy’s Annual Campus Pictorials; This Week Students From Local Schools Got Their Chance

Walking down the third-floor hallway of the high-rise Newport Beach hotel Monday afternoon, Elsa Ramon was so nervous she began to sweat.

“Why am I doing this?” she wondered as she scanned the doors, looking for Room 309.

The 18-year-old UC Irvine drama major said she had spent a month debating what to do. In fact, she said that at the last minute she had all but decided to back out, until some guys in her campus dorm encouraged her to go ahead.

As the former high school cheerleader faced the door to Room 309, she mustered all of her courage, thinking, “I’m here. I came this far. I might as well do it.”

She knocked softly on the door and went in.

For Ramon and other young UCI and Cal State Fullerton women who made the walk down the Marriott Suites hallway this week, entering Room 309 represented the opportunity of a lifetime--even if most of them cringed at the thought of telling their parents what they had done: They were interviewed for a chance to represent their campuses in Playboy magazine’s annual fall college football conference pictorial.

The young women may have been nervous, but inside Room 309 it was business as usual for veteran Playboy photographer David Chan.

“Hi, I’m David,” the soft-spoken, slightly built photographer said to his latest arrival.

“My name’s Elsa,” Ramon said shyly, sitting down on the sofa in the suite’s small living room.

As Chan prepared to shoot Polaroid pictures of Cal State Fullerton criminal justice major Joanne Joye on the balcony, Ramon picked up a Playboy application from the stack on the coffee table.

The form requests the kind of vital statistics that make Playboy one of the nation’s most popular men’s magazines--and one scorned by feminists: Applicants must fill in everything from their height, weight and hair color to bust, cup, waist and hip measurements.

Then there’s the last--and most critical--item on the list: “I would like to pose: nude, semi-nude, clothed.” (Ramon chose clothed and semi-nude.)

While waiting her turn to be photographed, she explained why she was there:

“Well, I’m usually a study bookworm and I thought I’m just going to do something that’s not me at all. I think it would be neat to be a part of the so-called American pastime.”

Which, she added with a photogenic smile, “is Playboy magazine.”

Ramon is not alone in wanting to be a part of what long ago became an American institution.

She was one of about 60 UCI and Cal State Fullerton women students interviewed this week as part of Playboy’s search for “the beautiful co-eds of Big West Conference colleges.”

The pictorial, featuring several clad and unclad students from each of the 10 schools in the conference, will run in the magazine’s October issue.

It seems there’s never a scarcity of applicants when Chan hits town.

Indeed, since Playboy began doing college conference pictorials in 1977, more than 11,000 college women from schools coast-to-coast have applied for a chance to appear in the annual pictorial.

Over the past 13 years, Chan has conducted searches at 82 different colleges and universities.

In the process, he has logged nearly a quarter of a million miles, traveled to 42 states, shot more than 12,500 rolls of 35-mm film, stayed in more than 200 different hotels and motels, banged up 16 rental cars and lost 12 pieces of luggage.

He has also attended 14 toga parties and judged 27 wet T-shirt contests.

And, along the way, he has discovered nine future Playmates, including the current Miss May, whom he found at the University of Texas in Austin two years ago.

The current search began in February. Chan and two assistants have already been to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, New Mexico State, Utah State, San Jose State, Cal State Fresno, the University of the Pacific and UC Santa Barbara.

They’ll move on to the Marriott near Cal State Fullerton on Monday and a week later they’ll complete their search by interviewing Cal State Long Beach women.

Most applicants don’t know what to expect when they walk in the Playboy hotel suite.

But if they’re expecting a Playboy photographer rakishly dressed in Hefneresque red silk pajamas, they’re in for a letdown.

On this day, Chan was wearing a gray Fresno State sweat shirt, jeans and black cowboy boots--with a hip complement of dark wire-rim glasses and several thin silver bracelets.

Playboy’s man on campus is friendly and low-keyed. The Canadian-born Chan grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, but spoke Chinese at home. Now based in Chicago and in his 50s, he avoids revealing his age by good-naturedly saying, “I stopped counting at 39.”

Chan studied at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and worked as a free-lance photographer in Los Angeles before joining Playboy in 1966. He has since photographed numerous Playmates and such pictorials as “The Girls of Spring Break” and the upcoming “The Girls of Canada.”

But Chan is best known for the college conference issues.

The photographer, who has been profiled in Time, People and the Wall Street Journal, concedes that it takes “a lot of guts” for a woman to show up for a Playboy interview.

Many applicants arrive with their boyfriends, but Chan tells the escorts to wait in the hotel bar. “I don’t want a bunch of guys sitting around here,” he said.

Some women are so nervous while Chan is taking pictures of them that, he said, their hands get clammy and their chest breaks out in rosy blotches.

But Chan’s low-key approach and seemingly sincere combination of friendliness and flattery puts most of them at ease.

Examining Polaroid shots of 22-year-old Joanne Joye’s poses, he raved, “You look great! The one with your camisole looks sexy.” And looking at snapshots Ramon brought with her of her high school prom, he rhapsodized, “You’re the prettiest one of them all.”

The women who show up for interviews generally view Playboy as the most prestigious of the men’s magazines and say they would be honored to be chosen to grace its well-scrutinized pages. As one UCI woman, who asked not to be identified because she hadn’t told her parents she was going for the interview, said: “Playboy is the only one I’d ever do it for.”

As Chan sees it, “it’s also an ego trip. I think when you’re young you like to be in a national magazine recognized as having beautiful women: You’re in it. You made the grade.”

For many, simply showing up for the interview is glory enough.

Chan said some applicants ask for one of his Playboy business cards, then ask him to sign it to prove to their friends that they’ve been there. Grins Chan: “Oh, yeah. It’s very cute sometimes.”

Not everyone on campus welcomes Playboy with open arms, however. Some student newspapers have refused to run Playboy’s advertisement announcing the search, and visits have been greeted with protests by campus feminists who say the magazine exploits women.

UCI’s campus newspaper, New University, ran the Playboy ad. Editor-in-chief Jon Nalick said he had not heard of any formal protests on campus or of any letters to the editor complaining of Playboy’s arrival. But, he observed, UCI is a “notoriously apathetic campus.”

As for Ramon, she said “anyone can do whatever they want with their body, and if they’re going to lay in front of a camera for a magazine for men to see, then that’s their business.”

Chan, however, doesn’t mind controversy when it crops up, saying, “I think that is very healthy. It’s good for the student body to think about (the issue).”

Besides, a protest is good publicity.

“I don’t know why, but when they protest it seems that more people turn up (for interviews),” Chan said.

Actually, whether they’re college students or not, Chan said he will interview any young woman who shows up at his hotel. He said they won’t qualify for the college conference pictorial, but they just “may be Playmate material.”

The application procedure is simple.

When women call his hotel suite to set up an interview, Chan or one of his assistants tell them to bring a bathing suit and some snapshots. Most bring school and family pictures, but some have already done some rather explicit posing for boyfriends. Laughs Chan: “They sometimes bring some pictures and even they embarrass me.”

To eliminate the feeling of a Hollywood cattle call, Chan tries to space interviews 15 to 20 minutes apart.

When a young woman arrives, she fills out the Playboy form and Chan takes several Polaroid pictures of her in different poses. He staples one of the pictures onto the application and mails them all to the Playboy editors in Chicago. Going over the selections with the editors by phone, Chan puts in his “two-bits’ and, if one applicant has particularly “great legs,” or some other admirable physical attribute, he said, “they’ll listen to me.”

It may take up to 10 days before a decision is made on which women will represent a particular school, Chan said, but he feels strongly about one of the women, he doesn’t wait for Chicago to decide.

Applicants need not have perfect bodies--”They don’t have to be Playmate material,” he said--but they must be photogenic.

Chan said that during the daylong photo sessions with the women chosen from each school, the women are posed on campus (clothed) or on nearby locations (nude and semi-nude) in ways meant to make them look their best. “She might have heavy legs, so we don’t use her in a bathing suit,” he explained.

Chan said few applicants even ask about the modeling fee, but those selected for the pictorial receive a minimal payment: $100 if they’re clothed, $250 for semi-nude (“you usually show your breasts” he says) and $500 for nude (“nude, you usually show more than breast”).

If appearing in Playboy is a fantasy for a lot of college women, being the man who photographs the women for Playboy might be the ultimate male dream job.

But Chan insists that he views his work on a purely professional level.

“I enjoy what I do,” he said, “but here’s the thing that people don’t understand: I love photography and it’s treated me very handsomely. But today, if I was shooting architecture or marine life, I would enjoy it just as much. I feel that when I’m behind the viewfinder it’s just like an artist having his brush or a chisel on their work.”

The fact that he is shooting beautiful young women, he said, is just a bonus.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling impishly, “because I like women.”

Her interview completed, an ebullient Ramon breathed a sigh of relief in the hallway outside Room 309.

“It took every gut that I had to do it,” said Ramon, who posed in shorts and her blue UCI sweat shirt. “I felt good because David made me feel I was very photogenic.”

She broke into giggles when asked what she thought her former high school classmates--those who know her for being active in student government, a member of the speech and debate team, a cheerleader and honor roll student--would think if they opened Playboy in October and saw her picture.

“Oh, I don’t want to think about it!”