Bodies of work
Texas Barbie, the towering and very buxom blond in the silver sequined bikini, causes a minor traffic backup at the entrance to the Radisson’s exhibition room. Those saucer-eyed men who resist the urge to stare, however, find themselves in a room full of similarly endowed women -- all of them selling nude and semi-nude images of themselves.
Beyond another bikini-clad beauty (a former stockbroker), past tiny Bee Tran (a 21-year-old punk magazine writer who recently found her calling as a nude pinup), sits Miss January 1971, Liv Lindeland. The former Playboy playmate still maintains a shoulder-length flaxen mane and charms photographers with her mischievous blue eyes. But she looks the part of the grandmother she is. And unlike her younger colleagues at the Vintage and Modern Pinups, or VAMP, show earlier this month at the Radisson Hotel near LAX, Lindeland bristles when a camera turns her way. “That’s a mean lens,” she says to a photographer aiming his telephoto at her.
Lindeland’s table is strewn with photos of a caramel-skinned, 25-year-old Norwegian girl with a mesmerizing gaze. These images, which made her famous, bear the soft-focus lighting and pastoral settings of the centerfold portraits of the 1970s. She notes another telltale sign that dates her. “We were real,” she says. “In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the surgery started.”
As pinups, Lindeland and others embodied the beauty ideals of their time and were celebrated with male adoration and female envy. Inevitably, time passed, and the youthful glow for which they were revered faded. Their lives changed. Some got married and settled into suburbia; others succumbed to the fast lane. Still others continue to stoke their notoriety, earning extra income at pinup collector events such as VAMP, Glamourcon and Playboy Expo shows. But today they appear side by side with smooth-skinned, surgically enhanced young women who are creating their own beauty ideals and moving beyond autographed glossies to members-only Web sites.
This is the plight of the pinup: Life goes on, but the cheesecake shot has a life of its own.
Meet Miss December ’81
A few tables away from Lindeland, Miss December 1981, Patti Farinelli, is looking uncomfortable. “This whole scene is not my scene,” she says. “I have a normal life.” These days, she’s content to raise her 8-year-old son at their home in Rancho Cucamonga and work in the drapery department of a Home Depot.
For Farinelli, it’s excruciating to smile politely as strangers compare the 42-year-old former centerfold to a photo of her at 21. In fact, her appearance at VAMP was filmed by a crew from TV’s “Extra,” which three days later filmed her plastic surgery, an extensive procedure involving a brow lift, a nose job and the transplant of fat from her inner thighs to the wrinkles around her mouth.
“You look at Cher and say, ‘I’d look that good too if I had the money,’ ” she says. “When I look in the mirror, I look old ....I feel young at heart, but I’ve aged quite a bit.”
In the universe of pinup collectors, however, aging beauties are “vintage,” not “old.” And they’re cherished as touchstones of nostalgia. Their fans are mostly white, middle aged, upper-middle-class men who are willing to fly across the country to see their favorite pinup in the flesh, revisit a time in their own youth and often spend hundreds of dollars on autographed glossies. And their devotion rejuvenates the subjects of their obsession.
“These guys are the kind of guys who would jump in front of the playmates to stop a bullet,” says Bob Schultz, a former bank manager who founded VAMP and Glamourcon in 1993. “You see a lot of these guys kind of kneeling on one knee talking to them. One guy calls it the Glamourcon ‘genuflection.’ ”
Miss September 1959, Marianne Gaba, experienced this reverence the first and only time she appeared at a Playboy Expo. She sat next to one of the magazine’s recent centerfolds, whose explicit photos made Gaba’s demure poses “look like a cooking class,” she says. Then the vintage pinup collectors arrived. “I had a line around the room and charged 10 times what the other girl charged!” says Gaba. “They came from Germany. They came from Australia. When they met me, they started shaking, and they said, ‘Oh my God! You can fill out my collection!’ ” At $50 per autographed picture, Gaba earned $4,000 in four hours.
But she recognizes one reason for her value on the collectors’ market. “They don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around,” she says.
At 63, Gaba is quick to point out during a phone interview that “I still look pretty good,” and when she answers the door of her Beverly Hills home she reveals a trim figure and a conservative ensemble not too far off from the girl-next-door image that landed her on the covers of Hollywood’s celebrity tabloids in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Back then, Gaba dated Ricky Nelson after a stint as his girlfriend on TV’s “Ozzy and Harriet,” and spent the night “necking” with Elvis Presley in his Beverly Hilton penthouse. She went on to roles in a series of beach movies -- “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” among them -- before marrying a stockbroker in 1962 and starting a family.
Gaba says her centerfold is a blessing to her self-image as she ages, not a curse. “It’s almost like a stamp of approval,” she says. “I was sexy. And I have this to prove it!”
The most famous pinups of this generation, of course, are those who posed in Playboy magazine, which mass-marketed the genre of nude photography beginning with its first centerfold in 1953. Hugh Hefner has been credited with originating the concept of including personal information about the women alongside their photos. “Prior to that, almost all erotic photography had been artists’ models who were never named,” says Playboy spokesman Bill Farley. “He wanted to turn them into the girl next door.”
Or a commodity. Hefner assures each centerfold: “Once a playmate, always a playmate.” After the hometown parade and the national press tour, alumni are eligible to join Playboy’s in-house modeling agency. And, of course, they’re always welcome at Hefner’s mansion in Holmby Hills. “It’s kind of a point of pride for Hef that once you’ve been a playmate you really become part of the Playboy family,” says Farley. There’s one enormous caveat to that statement, however. Playmates are family, Farley says, “as long as they look good, they want to work and there’s a demand for their services.”
Clearly, those without the good genes or the means for surgical maintenance aren’t as viable to the image of the media empire. But the monthly package of promotional head shots and swimsuit photos sent to all playmates provides a small source of income. Former centerfolds don’t own rights to their photos, so they autograph the promotional shots they get for free and sell them for as much as $50 each. An autographed copy of the issue in which they appeared sells for even more.
The new generation of pinups, or “nude models,” is free from some of the restrictions of the past. Unlike the girls of Gaba’s youth, who had to overcome far greater stigmas attached to “glamour shots” and often were cajoled into baring their skin, they arrange their own photo shoots. Then they post the pictures on the Web and charge viewers a fee.
“The difference today is that women are trying to own their content,” says VAMP founder Schultz. “Many women don’t sign blanket releases anymore. Many are saying, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re gonna do.’ Content is everything on the Web.”
New breed of beauty
At the VAMP convention, Bee Tran and her boyfriend, Aaron Powell, a photographer, stand side by side and exchange compliments like newlyweds. On a table before them are dozens of slick photographs of Tran in various stages of undress, and Powell refers to them as he details her affinity for the camera and her business acumen.
“The one thing she does, she goes after the best of the best,” he says. “She knows how to do the hookups....She does vintage pinup [poses] and fashion, and she makes her own clothes!” Today she wears a black satin corset that she decorated herself with rhinestones and pink ribbon.
After two years in community college, Tran realized she wasn’t prepared to transfer, as planned, to USC. But she was inspired by her classes in human sexuality and interpersonal communications, and the interplay between the two. She networked with other nude models, visited the Hustler store in Hollywood, copied photographers’ names from her favorite magazines and then contacted them. Six months later she was posing for some of the most reputable photographers in the business, including Tony Ward, Eric Kroll and Rondell Sheridan.
Tran soon learned that control is key. Relinquishing rights to your images is “like signing your soul to the devil,” she says via e-mail a few days after the convention. “You don’t know where these images may go out to.” By owning her photos, she says, “I am able to build and run my own business off the Web.”
Nevertheless, collectors’ shows are critical to building a fan base for those who don’t land a Playboy centerfold. That’s why Tran paid the $75 fee to rent a table at VAMP, and has also appeared at several car shows. She’s building a clientele for her new members-only Web site, which will offer about 40 changing nude photos of Tran to those who pay a $14 monthly fee.
Yet despite her empowerment and enterprise, Tran dreams of being a magazine centerfold. “For some reason, being featured on ANY men’s magazine is like getting a trophy for being beautiful or that you’re an interesting person,” she writes.
Coco Johnsen, whose table at VAMP attracts a steady stream of eager collectors, lists her most recent career accomplishments in the urgent staccato of a screenwriter pitching a script: a series of beer commercials, the title of “Cybergirl of the Week” on Playboy.com, a tiny speaking role in Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris,” and her self-published calendar, which she estimates will generate $50,000.
“The Internet ... has enabled models and actresses to take control of their careers,” she says. “Before, we had to rely on the agents to get all the work for us.”
A New York model, Johnsen moved to Los Angeles about a year ago to pursue an acting career, and a month after her arrival she submitted her photos to Playboy. The VAMP show was a good way to generate memberships to her Web site. In the two weeks after her appearance, she landed 60 members; each will pay $12 monthly to access her photos and her online diary.
“You are the product,” says Johnsen. “It’s important that you take control of the product and make sure it’s seen in the best light it can be seen in. No one can sell you like you can.”
A man wearing a tidy blue oxford and khakis approaches Johnsen demurely. “Hi, Miss Johnsen. Can I have a Polaroid?” he asks. Johnsen whips out her camera, a must-have for today’s pinups to ensure control of their image. “Sure!” she says brightly. A scantily clad young woman sitting next to her takes the picture, and in a flash, Johnsen earns another fan and another $10.
